Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Proposal: Location, Location, Location

Reached quorum 5 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 05 Oct 2012 09:22:12 UTC

Add a new Rule to the Ruleset, the “The Classroom”:

The Classroom is composed of ‘Student Desk’s organized in a 4x4 square, each which corresponds to a unique number from 1 to 16. The Students shall always occupy one (and only one) of those desks, and, with the exception of the Professor, never the same Desk occupied by other Student.
The Professor have his own desk (which corresponds to the number 0, and is also part of the Classroom) and is the only one who can occupy it.
The number of the Desk a Student currently occupy is tracked in the “Desk” column in the GNDT.
The Professor may, as a Daily Action, change his current Desk number to any other he wants.
Any Student may, as a Daily action, change his own current Desk number to any Desk he wants, as long as it is not already occupied by another Student, and it is next to the Desk he is currently in.
A Desk doesn’t exist if it’s not mentioned in this Rule.

The Desk’s positions in The Classroom are as follows:
..........0
1….2….3….4
5….6….7….8
9…10…11..12
13..14…15..16
(the points were only used to make the positions clearer)

Two Desks are said to be next to each other if they connect directly vertically, horizontally or diagonally (e.g. the Desk 1 is next to 2, 6 and 5, and no other Desk). The Professor’s Desk is never next to any other Desk.
Whenever the Professor occupy a Desk different from his own, all the Desks next to it are said to be in the Professor’s Area of Influence (PAoI, for short).

Create a new column in the GNDT called “Desk”, set the Professor’s Desk value to 0 and randomly set the Desk values of the other Students (with the DICE16 command). If this action ever makes 2 Students ocuppy the same Desk, randomly set the last value again.

posted by IceFromHell at 03 Oct 2012 22:14:11 UTC Comments (9)

Comments

Clucky: he/him

03-10-2012 23:47:25 UTC

what if there are more than 16 students? Could put the game into an infinite loop if a lot of players join…

IceFromHell:

04-10-2012 00:33:14 UTC

That’s possible, but I didn’t see it as an urgent matter. A “mutating” classroom is an idea I was thinking of implementing, but didn’t want it to be too complex. An easy patch would be something in the lines of “The Classroom is always a AxA square, where A is equal to the square of Quorum”, but that would lead to really unexpected behaviour of the classroom. On second thought, something as “new Students may not have to occupy a Desk if there is no non occupied Desks” could work also, as a temporary fix.
Anyway, a Cfj, as far as I have undertood how those work, could easily solve the problem if we see Student numbers increasing (but again, it’s more than twice what we have now, I do think at least one of those solutions would pass before then).
This raises the question though, would it be legal to let new players join if it would cause the game to get into such a loop? (I remember reading somewhere that taking an action which would render the game unplayable was ilegal, but it might have been another nomic, as I can’t find it in the Ruleset right now)

Bucky:

04-10-2012 02:41:26 UTC

for
we can expand the room if there are more than, say, 9 Students.

Bucky:

04-10-2012 02:41:42 UTC

Err, make that a for  arrow

quirck: he/him

04-10-2012 09:08:42 UTC

imperial  arrow

Josh: he/they

04-10-2012 09:37:54 UTC

for

Kevan: he/him

04-10-2012 10:04:50 UTC

for  arrow

Kevan: he/him

04-10-2012 21:01:52 UTC

[Ice] There’s actually no mechanic to assign desk numbers to new students, so we’d hit a problem as soon as somebody joined - the new player must “always occupy one (and only one) of those desks”, but we don’t know which one.

We don’t have a formal way of dealing with mystery gamestate conditions like this; maybe we should. In practice we’d raise a CfJ to agree on a way to resolve it and collapse the gamestate into something stable, but this is not perfect.

IceFromHell:

05-10-2012 02:12:02 UTC

[Kevan] You’re right, that’s something I really missed when thinking this out.

Ok, I’ll try to avoid relying on it in the future, thanks for all the info.