Proposal: Matchsticks
Times out and fails 1-2 -SingularByte
Adminned at 07 Apr 2022 06:39:04 UTC
Add the following to “Theses”
If a researcher generates another Thesis which is different from but has the same Thesis Hash as a given Thesis, then both Thesis are considered to be invalid. This generation may be done even when the game is in Hiatus, meaning victory obtained from an invalid Thesis may be challenged by posting another Thesis which has the same hash as the one used by the Researcher who Declared Dominion Over Randomness
Hopefully this calms some of Josh’s concerns around abusing the salt to do shenanigans with the hashes. Seems tough to pull out anyways, but seems fine to face any scenario where its unclear if someone changed their thesis cause there are multiple things it could be to generate the same hash to be able to just go “okay yeah nope”
Yes, in theory, someone could reverse sha256 but if they can do that why are they playing blognomic instead of getting rich?
Comments
Josh: he/they
... What’s stopping someone from copying another players hash and posting it as their thesis without knowing what the plaintext is, just to aggressively cancel the first player’s thesis?
SingularByte: he/him
Formally the thesis is the collection of outputs, so it comes before the plaintext is even created.
Josh: he/they
Sure, but that can’t be verified and there’s no mechanism that actually forces a player to know what their thesis is - posting a hash that they plausibly believe to contain a valid thesis seems likely to be legal to me.
SingularByte: he/him
So maybe the new rule should be “If a researcher generates and reveals another Thesis”
Even if the first researcher pretends it didn’t cancel theirs, it’s not like they can declare victory at that point since it could be called out as invalid the moment they post it.
It does look like you can just copy their outputs and change the salt once someone reveals it to declare victory though, so the salt should probably be excluded from this check.
SingularByte: he/him
Actually ignore that, changing the salt changes the hash. I’m being dumb.
SingularByte: he/him
Or actually, I’m seeing the fault with it now. Josh is right that you can maliciously block people basically for free. If the final output is 27 and the salt is Bears, then you can declare that an output of 2 has a salt of 7Bears. Maybe the salt needs a delimiter. Something like all salts must be in angular brackets.
Josh: he/they
I don’t understand why both theses have to be invalid; surely invalidating the latter is sufficient.
SingularByte: he/him
I think the point is so you can prove foul play. The second thesis isn’t meant to be a real one, it’s intended to show that the first one is too ambiguous to be counted.
Clucky: he/him
Added a line that the generated thesis has to be different in order to render the other one invalid
Clucky: he/him
The 27 thing is a valid point, but also something I’m trying to fix in a manner that doesn’t reset the timer on peoples theses
Goal was to prevent a scenario where you could claim victory on both 27 and 2 being that last output, and make us believe that bears or 7bears was your salt. But I missed how easy that scenario was to hit, was instead thinking of scenarios where like, you had the names of functions in your salt or in your function outputs
Clucky: he/him
But I can’t think of a way to fix that problem tonight already up way too late so guess will see where things stand in the morning
SingularByte: he/him
This still leaves a bit of a hole. If you have a thesis of Func1: 11, Func2: 12, Func3: 13, Func4: 14, Func5: 15, Salt: Cookies then it could be blocked by a thesis of Func1: 11, Func2: 12, Func3: 13, Func4: 14, Func5: 1, Salt: 5Cookies
SingularByte: he/him
Ah sorry, didn’t check for more posts. Ignore that post.
SingularByte: he/him
Josh: he/they
MadisonSilver: