Subject: Thermo II: Thought

From: "Laurence J Koehn" <koehn61802@y...>
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 01:42:21 -0000

Hey, all,

Looked over the proposed initial ruleset for Thermo II, thinking I'd 
have all sorts of changes to suggest, but it looks like Craig has 
thought of everything. Kudoses to him.

One little thing, though I can't think of an easy way out of it. 
Removing the old rule 4.0 certainly makes it easier to create more 
complex rules. Introducing some kind of subgame would be ridiculous 
if every sentence of the rules had to be voted on individually. Not 
that there might not be some advantage to that, but still. The 
problem, though, is that by making a whole complex rule a "thing", it 
may be too easy to lose large chunks of the ruleset, particularly if 
the SSL kicked in. Then again, maybe that's more incentive to keep 
things moving.

Also, I guess I've been tending to think of Thermo in terms of 
conservation of matter and energy, with "things" being matter 
and "therms" being energy. The two can be transformed from one to 
the other, but the total number of "things" and "therms" can't change 
as long as the system is closed. Is this too far off the concept? 
(It's been ages since I took Intro to Thermodynamics.) If so, that 
excuses the willy-nilly creation of things when a new player joins, 
since the system is not closed at that point. (And also should allow 
things to be brought in from a Nomic Market, if such an idea should 
be incorporated, without other things needing to be destroyed.) On 
the other hand, players being able to create proposals at any time 
kind of breaks down the analogy. Am I mistaken in thinking that a 
player could create a slew of bogus proposals and then destroy them 
in order to create other useful things? Perhaps each player should 
be given a fund of coins when they join and have to destroy a coin in 
order to submit a proposal (uh-oh, incentive *not* to make proposals--
not a good thing, I suspect). Should the idea of the game being a 
closed system except in certain specific cases be laid out in the 
rules?

Finally, if Thermo I is officially over and anyone (besides me) is 
interested in a Thermo II, could we have the auto-posting of the 
final ruleset of Thermo I stopped, or perhaps replaced by the initial 
ruleset of Thermo II?

Thanks for letting me ramble.

Laurence