Thursday, August 15, 2024

Proposal: Figuratively Fishy

Reached quorum, 3-1. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 17 Aug 2024 17:56:22 UTC

In the rule “Fish Function” and the rule “The Big One” replace each instance of “alphanumeric” with “alphabetic”.

In the rule “Fish Function”, replace each instance of the text “is a fish” with “is In Season”, and in the same rule, add the following text:

An alphabetic string is In Season if it meets all of the following criteria:
* It satisfies the criteria described in the Fish Function
* It is not any part of the name nor the entire name of a fish in the list of fish names, ignoring any differences in upper or lower case letters, listed by the sections labeled “A” through “Z” on this Wikipedia page as it existed in the version of the page at the following URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_fish_common_names&oldid=1217985466

The Fish Function is illegal if there does not exist any alphabetic string that can be In Season.

Trying to address Clucky’s complaint that The Big One (and the Fish Function in general) is too easy when the possible space is limited to actual fish names.

Also getting rid of the “numeric” part of the strings, because it causes too many problems with other parts of the rules and isn’t necessary when we can expand the possible guessing space to all alphabetical strings that satisfy the Fish Function that aren’t actually names of real fish.

Comments

Darknight: he/him

16-08-2024 05:16:10 UTC

for

Lukas:

17-08-2024 01:10:13 UTC

for

Clucky: Puzzle Master he/him

17-08-2024 06:09:07 UTC

This actually arguably makes the “The Big One (and the Fish Function in general) is too easy when the possible space is limited to actual fish names.” problem even worse because we’ll get:

The Big One is a fish (i.e. an alphabetic string of letters that satisfies the Fish Function)


and while its always been the case that a “fish” is defined to be “an alphabetic string of letters that satisfies the Fish Function” (and thus does not have to be an actual fish) we are losing the definition of what it means to be a fish. We’ll still have “i.e. an alphabetic string of letters that satisfies the Fish Function” but I think that is a bit weaker, and so make it more likely that the big one must actually be a fish in the english sense

against