Sunday, July 09, 2023

Proposal: Rejected Punchcards

Reaches quorum 8-0 and is enacted -SingularByte

Adminned at 09 Jul 2023 21:41:11 UTC

In “Initialisation Phase Two”, replace the “Delete Agendas” bullet point with:-

Delete Agendas until there exists a number of Agendas that is exactly four times the number of active Machinists, prioritising the deletion of Agendas that include the Initialisation Key(s) which appear in the most existing Agendas.

Add two bullet points before it:

* Delete all Agendas that the Great Machine judges to be unfairly easy or difficult to Fulfill, or that refer to or otherwise uniquely identify specific Machinists.
* If there are fewer Agendas than four times the number of active Machinists, then create Agendas until this is no longer the case.

Remove the sentence “These Agendas’ conditions must not refer to or otherwise uniquely identify specific Machinists.” from the ruleset.

Perhaps we shouldn’t allow any Agendas that the Great Machine judges to be “unfairly easy or difficult to Fulfill” into the game, rather than asking them to trim the Agenda stack down to exactly 32 and stop there.

This proposal adds around 170 characters net to the ruleset.

Comments

lemon: she/her

09-07-2023 08:31:22 UTC

huh, good idea! i do have three complaints, but you’ll have a greentick from me either way.

1) i’d prefer that the duplication clause specify Agendas that haven’t already been duplicated, since if there’s a big enough deficit of Agendas, it’s likely for a small proportion of the existing Agendas to form a statistics snowball and have multiple copies. i /also/ think that 2+ copies of the same Agenda should never be dealt to the same Machinist, but that’s prolly best as its own proposal.

2) i do want there to end up being agendas equal to 4x active Machinists, so that there’s a healthy pile of reserves for potential unidlers or Agenda-swapping mechanics.

3) i think that deleting all unfair Agendas should take place before deleting all Agendas with the most common keyterms, so that i don’t end up having to remove well-balanced Agendas while there’s still tons of unfair ones on the stack.

Kevan: he/him

09-07-2023 08:35:48 UTC

Good points all. Duplication changed to have the Machine write new ones, since they’re writing some anyway; multiplier raised to four; order swapped.

Josh: he/they

09-07-2023 09:02:14 UTC

I’ll also be in favour of this, but we should consider Agendas that are extremely hard or actually impossible as well.

SingularByte: he/him

09-07-2023 09:14:03 UTC

Isn’t that covered under the first bullet point? “unfairly easy or *difficult* to Fulfill”

Josh: he/they

09-07-2023 09:47:28 UTC

Oh, fair, a reading comprehension fail there.

Kevan: he/him

09-07-2023 10:09:20 UTC

Whether Lemon will consider an “extremely hard” Agenda to be “unfairly” so, and throw it out, is an interesting question.

If most Agendas look like they’ll take about ten actions to complete and a few will require a hundred, will the hundreds get rejected as “unfairly difficult”, or are they just at different ends of the “easy-but-fair / difficult-but-fair” spectrum?

SingularByte: he/him

09-07-2023 12:34:14 UTC

I like most of this, but I’m quite uncomfortable about removing the restriction on naming players now that I’ve read through the ruleset properly. I could see some really unpleasant play patterns coming from malicious agendas. Nothing would stop me submitting something like “Ensure you give SingularByte at least 1 point from resources X and Y each time you vote against a proposal authored by him.”

SingularByte: he/him

09-07-2023 12:34:53 UTC

Wait, sorry, that’s a reading fail of my own. You just moved it to a bullet point didn’t you.

for

Lulu: she/her

09-07-2023 13:49:18 UTC

for

Josh: he/they

09-07-2023 13:55:42 UTC

for

Bucky:

09-07-2023 15:10:14 UTC

imperial

JonathanDark: he/him

09-07-2023 16:13:33 UTC

for

Maldor: he/him

09-07-2023 17:55:09 UTC

for

lemon: she/her

09-07-2023 20:03:49 UTC

for