Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Declaration of Victory: I’m Spartacus

Is unpopular, 2-3. Failed by Josh

Adminned at 31 May 2023 17:38:17 UTC

I have achieved victory in this dynasty, and I’ll tell you for why.

So, first, some ruleset concepts:

* From “Enacting and Failing”, ‘A votable matter is resolved by an admin setting its status through use of the “status” field in the blog post editing form’. Therefore the first person to edit the form is the enactor and only that person is the enactor; any person doing enactment-like things thereafter is doing illegal actions that can be disregarded.
* However, enactment is not an atomic action. There are in fact two actions: the one above, which is the act of enactment, and ‘When a Proposal is Enacted, its stated effects are immediately applied in full”, from Resolution of Proposals, which is a separate action. None of this is atomic and all of it can be interrupted.

Here is the timeline of events, as I understand it:

* Redtara enacts the proposal by marking the form.
* Bucky enacts the proposal by marking the form, but as they do it second, they are not the enactor; none of their enactment is valid.
* Bucky carries out a Growth Tick action.
* Redtara makes the roll as directed in the proposal, but because Redtara has made a Growth Tick in the interim, that roll reflects improper information about the gamestate.
* Redtara makes a second roll correcting the above step, and it makes me the winner.

All of this together means that… I am the winner. I have won. Please vote for me. Please. Thank you.

{NB:

Bucky posted this to Discord about my path to victory:

* Redtara's original enactment-mark was valid even if the changes were applied incorrectly;
* My growth tick should have been taken into account in the victory roll because it happened before any version of the victory roll did, even though it happened after the enactment mark
* My enactment attempt was entirely invalid because redtara had already marked the proposal enacted, even though none of its changes had been performed yet and they were performed incorrectly.
* Redtara's failure to actually publish the list that the proposal required the creation of is immaterial.

This post has answered the first three points; on the fourth, the list of names is not an orphan variable because it can be derived from the from the gamestate, and the proposal did not require the list to be otherwise published.}

posted by Josh at 30 May 2023 20:24:00 UTC Comments (17)

Comments

Bucky:

30-05-2023 20:55:03 UTC

You reversed your second and third steps; I carried out the Growth Tick before I marked the form for enactment.

redtara: they/them

30-05-2023 20:55:19 UTC

against no this is spatricus

Josh: he/they

30-05-2023 20:57:20 UTC

@Bucky Oh, thank you; thanks to Red’s vote I can’t edit but it doesn’t affect the argument, it just has to have been between red’s marking the form enacted and making the roll.

Bucky:

30-05-2023 20:58:28 UTC

against

My interpretation of “When a Proposal is Enacted, its stated effects are immediately applied in full” is that any of the proposed changes carried out during the enactment sequence are considered to have happened at the time the proposal was marked enacted and in the stated order, even if the back end shows the changes to their respective tracking documents happening before or after the enactment mark.

Josh: he/they

30-05-2023 21:02:39 UTC

@Bucky What’s the basis for that interpretation? The ruleset doesn’t appear to make any statements about timing; in fact it goes to great pains to separate the enacting clauses, making it relatively clear that they are distinct.

The proposal in question doesn’t have anything that can be magically applied to a platomic ruleset; it contains a sequence of instructions that must occur, physically, as carried out by a person. Is your argument that these actions occurred magically before they actually took place?

I will also remind of the clause in Representations of the Gamestate:

“If authorised by the rules as a result of a City Architect’s action, changes to gamestate which is tracked in a specific place (such as a wiki page) do not take effect until the representation of that gamestate has been updated to match the authorised change.”

The place where this particular change is tracked is the post to the blog, although the dice roller timestamps do also have some heft.

Bucky:

30-05-2023 21:48:37 UTC

What is “When a Proposal is Enacted” if not a statement about timing?

Josh: he/they

30-05-2023 21:50:45 UTC

Proximate at best; “when it is sunny, clothes get dry” does not imply that the clothes become dry the instant the sun rises.

JonathanDark: he/him

30-05-2023 21:53:17 UTC

I feel like I have to for with Josh on this one. However much we’d like “immediately” to be without interruption, unless the rules make it atomic, it’s interruptible.

It definitely introduces the possibility of changing the course of enactment, but that’s been possible from other means: the Proposal altering rules that no longer exist due to another Proposal enacted first, or referencing invalid gamestate variables, for some examples.

It also shows the potential abuse vector from admins who are rightfully clearing the Proposal queue by processing multiple Proposals at once, but without an atomic action binding the order of admin’ing the Proposal and the order of enactment, could in theory enact them out-of-order, especially if doing so would be advantageous.

Josh: he/they

30-05-2023 21:54:33 UTC

I definitely think we should do a pass on the language around enactment early in the next dynasty as it is full of holes.

JonathanDark: he/him

30-05-2023 21:56:01 UTC

To illustrate further, suppose I’m an admin that just edited a Proposal as admin’ed passing, and then I get an urgent message from my day job and have to spend the next 30 minutes doing that job before being able to get back to actually implementing the Proposal changes.

Is the gamestate and ruleset truly frozen in those 30 minutes? On what basis?

Bucky:

30-05-2023 22:03:49 UTC

It’s not frozen, but the stuff you did 30 minutes later is considered to have happened when you edited the proposal.

Josh: he/they

30-05-2023 22:05:40 UTC

@Bucky How do you square that with the above-mentioned

“If authorised by the rules as a result of a City Architect’s action, changes to gamestate which is tracked in a specific place (such as a wiki page) do not take effect until the representation of that gamestate has been updated to match the authorised change.”

?

Bucky:

30-05-2023 22:55:19 UTC

That doesn’t apply to the critical “make a list” step.

Chiiika: she/her

31-05-2023 05:37:37 UTC

against

redtara: they/them

31-05-2023 08:47:33 UTC

Yes, the real question is whether the *list* was made before or after Bucky’s growth tick. In fact, it was made immediately upon marking the proposal enacted (I already knew what it would be, since I had checked the figures immediately prior). So even if Bucky’s growth tick occurred, it didn’t matter since the list was already made.

And no I can’t prove it, but you can take my word for it!

Chiiika: she/her

31-05-2023 11:17:00 UTC

for revote green tick; frick EE

Chiiika: she/her

31-05-2023 12:13:34 UTC

against frick EE, and cc discussion