Declaration of Victory: That isn’t what “heuristic” means
Wiktionary gives the following three meanings for “heuristic”:
1. (of an approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery) That employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect; either not following or derived from any theory, or based on an advisedly oversimplified one.
2. (computing, of a method or algorithm) That provides a useful, but not optimal, solution to a problem. Such algorithms are typically employed either because the only known algorithms that provide optimal solutions use too much time or resources, or else because there is no known algorithm that provides an optimal solution.
3. (of an argument) That reasons from the value of a method or principle that has been shown by experimental investigation to be a useful aid in learning, discovery and problem-solving.
Merriam-Webster gives the following two meanings for “heuristic”:
1. involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods
2. of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (such as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance
The Cambridge English Dictionary gives the followng two meanings for “heuristic”:
1. (of a method of teaching) allowing students to learn by discovering things themselves and learning from their own experiences rather than by telling them things
2. arriving at a solution by trying different actions to see if they produce the result that is wanted, rather than using strict rules
The above definitions are for “heuristic” as an adjective, but all of them define the meaning as a noun as “an argument/method/procedure that is heuristic”.
The important thing here is that none of those definitions can be said to apply to “a description or table that plainly maps how the result of a dice roll will select a single Nomicer, such that each Nomicer has a chance of being selected equal to their Equity as a proportion of all Equity in the game.” Although such a description existed in my Roll Off post, the rule requires the victory to go to “the Nomicer selected by the dice roll as determined by the heuristic described in the post”, and as the table was not a heuristic, it’s clearly irrelevant in determining the winner of the dynasty.
To resolve this issue and allow the dynasty to end correctly, I also put something into the post that does seem to match the definition of a “heuristic” – a somewhat imperfect and biased method of rolling of by experimentally asking Nomicers if they thought they’d met a subjective victory threshold based on the dice roll. Being first in alphabetical order, I asked me first, and I replied that I did think I’d done enough. As such, the nomicer selected by the dice roll according to the heuristic was me, and thus I have achieved victory.
(The Nomicer selected according to the table is irrelevant, given that the table isn’t a heuristic – if we don’t go by the heuristic than nobody has won, and we will need a proposal or CFJ to fix the ruleset and allow the dynasty to end properly. As it happens, though, the dice roll according to the table also selected me, so this bug in the rules ended up not influencing the result.)