Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Proposal: I personally prefer Jelly…

sked—Clucky

Adminned at 05 Jul 2012 10:14:13 UTC

Add a new rule to “Machines” called “Rebooting”

As a daily action, a Worker may attempt Reboot a section of the Machine Floor. To do so, he picks an integer between three and ten inclusive and activates that many machines.

If all of the Machines Activated are not Shrouded, all of the Machines Activated have a Gerund name or all of the Machines Activated have a Noun name, and more than half of the Machines Activated are not Jammed then all Machines which were Activated and are Jammed become Broken. Note that each Activated Machine is only counted once, even if it is Activated multiple times during the same Reboot attempt.

So you need to go noun-gerund or gerund-noun to fix broken machines, but you need a group of nouns or a group of gerunds to unjam machines. Adds some balance.

Note that this adds a problem of what happens if all the noun machines get jammed. My solution is to add a weekly action that lets you switch a machine from being a Noun to a Gerund or vice versa (removing all links to and from it) but wanted to propose that separately. Still would have the problem of “what if there is only one or zero non-jammed machines” but I think in that case its okay to say we all lose and start a meta dynasty…

posted by Clucky at 03 Jul 2012 18:25:12 UTC Comments (8)

Comments

kops:

03-07-2012 20:17:23 UTC

against

Many issues:

(a) under the current ruleset getting all gerunds or all nouns is more or less a practical impossibility due to randomness

(b) the wording is poor; I would happily interpret

“If all of the Machines Activated are not Shrouded, all of the Machines Activated have a Gerund name or all of the Machines Activated have a Noun name”

to mean “(not shrouded OR gerund OR noun)” rather than the intended “(not shrouded) AND (gerund OR noun)”

(c) Why do we want state flow to be like this?
I would expect it to follow something like:

Broken <-> repaired <-> jammed

But you have it in a cycle:

broken -> repaired -> jammed -> broken

Clucky: he/him

03-07-2012 20:25:27 UTC

The way I view it, “broken” is the default, neutral state. “Repaired” is the good state, and “Jammed” is the super bad state. It *should* be hard to unjam machines, especially with poor robots who aren’t designed to unjam machines.

kops:

03-07-2012 20:34:15 UTC

I’d much rather have a jammed printer than a broken one…

And if jammed is so bad, machine activations shouldn’t jam the machines; it should only come from doing something explicitly wrong (like the existing power link cycle mechanic).

Anyway I think point (a) is the worst mark against this proposal, (c) is relatively subjective.

Kevan: he/him

03-07-2012 20:42:27 UTC

against Per (a) and (c) - even hitting three Unshrouded machines is tricky.

quirck: he/him

03-07-2012 21:03:00 UTC

(c) is tricky while there are few unshrouded machines, but the time will come when it will become easier. (a) though is much harder

Kevan: he/him

03-07-2012 21:11:00 UTC

Is it? Once we’ve got enough Machines Unshrouded, successfully hitting three Nouns or Gerunds at once is only a 1-in-4 chance, if they’re evenly distributed. (If they’re not, the odds improve.)

Although if you want to reboot one particular Machine in a sea of Unshrouded ones, the odds of hitting it and two similar-type Machines could be as high as 1-in-8*X (where X is the footprint of your Robot).

Clucky: he/him

03-07-2012 22:51:26 UTC

So my original idea was to force you to establish “bonds” which are like links, except they go between nouns and nouns or gerunds and gerunds. Then once you have a bond group with enough non-jammed machines, you can unjam (to broken) the machines in the bond group.

It would certainly make things easier, it just would be a little similar to the links so I decided to go with a one-time thing.

Clucky: he/him

05-07-2012 17:13:58 UTC

against so I can make another proposal