Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Proposal: Monkey Business

Timed Out—Fails 1-3—Clucky

Adminned at 09 Aug 2007 11:12:42 UTC

Replace the second paragraph of ‘Doing the Dance’ with the following two paragraphs:

If a Dance has not been conducted within the last forty eight hours, and a List is not pending, and the monkey doing so has not updated their section of the dance within the last six hours, and if the Line is not Unbalanced, then a monkey may order the dance. To do so, e randomly puts all of the active monkeys into a List. (This List is different than the monkey line). The monkey publishes the List in a Wiki page, and then posts an entry to the blog with a link to that page.

The List shall remain in this order and the Dance moves to be executed shall not be altered, except as allowed by the rules, for at least twenty-four hours after posting in the blog. After twenty-four hours, any monkey may conduct the Dance, using the final published List. E takes the first monkey on that List and follows each of the dance moves for that monkeys section, in order. If the Line becomes Unbalanced, the Unbalance must be corrected before processing the next Dance move. If the monkey has more moves in eir section of the dance than dance moves, only the first N moves are followed where in is that monkey’s number of dance moves. After conducting all of the moves for the first monkey, the monkey conducting the dance proceeds to the next monkey in line, following the same steps as outlined above. E continues to do this until the dance section for every monkey has been executed. E must then make a post to the blog saying e has performed the dance, and provide a link to a Wiki page outlining the changes that were made.

Then add the following subsection to this section, titled ‘Monkey Business’:

At any time during the initial 24 hours after posting the List, any monkey may swap any two monkeys in the List, by using up a Banana (reducing eir Banana count by one), assuming e has at least one Banana. E must post this in the blog, and alter the wiki page appropriately. If two or more monkeys affect the order in this way, the List shall be determined by applying the changes in the order that the blog entries are posted.

Comments

Clucky: he/him

07-08-2007 18:20:14 UTC

against

Someone can simply spend one banana right before they conduct the dance to make sure a certain action happens to them first. I like the random nothing you can do about it order. So even without that above possbility, I’d probably be against this.

aaronwinborn:

07-08-2007 18:28:06 UTC

Note that i just added ‘and the Dance moves to be executed’ because I thought it while writing the proposal, but forgot to implicitly state it. Not sure if that’s allowed. That doesn’t address your concerns, which are valid. Just putting this out there :)

My concern with the way it is is there’s no way to enforce what’s ‘random’. (Unless there’s a method I’m unaware of that’s traditionally used, and fool-proof.)

aaronwinborn:

07-08-2007 18:38:42 UTC

so for instance, in about 5 hours by the current rule set, i could order the list in a way that i know favors my monkey, and if i want to go through the motions, run the list a few times through the http://random.org/lists/ until it matches up. then i tell everyone i came up with the list ‘randomly’.

maybe if there were a list randomizer that stored the lists created. or some way of creating a random seed number that could then be used to order things.

aaronwinborn:

07-08-2007 18:51:44 UTC

even if we took out the monkey business bit, i can’t think of a way right now to ensure fairness in creating the order, unless we could find a fool-proof randomizing method. *maybe* if the conductor of the dance had to pull out eir monkey, but even then, e might favor some other monkey for some reason. :(

Clucky: he/him

07-08-2007 19:06:46 UTC

Who is going to cheat when randomizing? I would like to think that everyone here has enough respect for eachother that that won’t happen.

aaronwinborn:

07-08-2007 19:21:08 UTC

good point :)

that wasn’t the reason for proposing monkey business any way, just some afterthoughts.

well, unless you veto or i decide to sk, guess we’ll see if anyone wants to monkey around…

Chivalrybean:

07-08-2007 19:33:50 UTC

against

Hix:

07-08-2007 21:39:59 UTC

against