I don’t quite agree with your analysis, but I do agree that the commonly-understood interpretation of the Roll Off process resulted in you being selected as the Nomicer who achieved victory.

Had the dice roll been performed by someone else, or had selected someone else, I’m sure debate would have ensued, but nevertheless, it all seems to have worked out regardless of anyone’s opinions on what “heuristic” means in the context of that rule.

And for anyone wondering, this is why I think it’s useful to have a “you can declare victory as long as you think the victory will generally be accepted” rule.

If I hadn’t noticed that “heuristic” was entirely the wrong word, we’d just have done a roll-off, and people would DoV based on roll-off results based on a description or table.

Now, I did happen to notice that “heuristic” was entirely the wrong word; that meant that it would (without a rules fix) be impossible to win the dynasty the “normal” way. Suppose I decided to do a normal roll-off DoV anyway – the DoV would technically be illegal but nobody else would know (and that problem was the problem I was trying to fix with my proposals). Or suppose I did a normal roll-off but didn’t DoV; people would wonder why, and once I’d pointed out that it was due to the rule being broken, someone else would probably have done their own roll-off post with their own biased heuristic in it (nothing in the rules prevents the performance of multiple Rolls Off!)

The end result is: once I’d spotted this ridiculous (yet straightforward) scam, the ruleset basically conspired to force me to use it, otherwise the dynasty would end in a mess of CFJs (as is tradition). It probably would be a mess even with this scam involved, if not for the fact that the heuristic and table selected the same player; so regardless of whether you think the scam works or not, I have won. (I think that the scam works, though, and even more am of the belief that the “conventional” victory condition is broken.) That said, I’m pretty sure I would have tried the scam regardless; a roll-off that gives me a basically 100% chance of victory is preferable to one that gives me a 33/115 chance of victory and a lot more interesting (and I think this is the most clearly valid dynasty-ending scam that we’ve had recently – the word “heuristic” clearly doesn’t apply to the table, so the only possible ambiguity is whether a heuristic method of selecting a Nomicer using a dice roll is possible at all.)

This scam explains why I was trying to speedrun the dynasty and get to Lacuna as soon as possible – given that the victory condition as written in the ruleset didn’t actually take Equity into account at all, basically all gameplay in the entire dynasty was meaningless (apart from in terms of being able to be the one to trigger Lacuna). JonathanDark noticed that the Lacuna happened at an awkward time of day for most players to be online. That wasn’t a coincidence (and took a bit of queue manipulation to pull off) – the “heuristic” scam seemed sufficiently straightforward that I was scared that someone else (e.g. Kevan) would get to it first, so I arranged things to make it as difficult as possible for someone else to snipe the Roll Off (e.g. by making a somewhat unpredictable Equity change last-moment so that anyone trying to snipe me would end up using the wrong numbers, in addition to the timezone shenanigans).

Josh gets the last laugh for encouraging us to try to add a way to get out of Lacuna, which might have increased the chance that someone would have spotted this, only for everyone to fall in line with the scam anyway.

I still maintain that a scammer gets to keep whatever advantage they had gained in the scam, regardless of when it happens in the dynasty. When I was a slightly newer player, I didn’t quite understand this concept and proposed a patch to a scammed rule that also took away the scammer’s scammed resources, which was correctly called out as a no-no. I’ve learned since then.

All that is to say: well done twice, first with the roll, and second with the scam that made the roll irrelevant (if one agrees that there was a scam to begin with). It’s somewhat of a moot point now, but there’s probably some philosophical value to discussing it.

Working out what to do after a player scams a large but not dynasty-ending reward is quite difficult, especially if it makes the game near-unwinnable for everyone else. Entirely reverting the scam is bad for the game, but leaving the entire advantage can also be bad for the game (as you basically end up with an extreme case of fool’s gold).

From the scammer’s point of view, you typically deal with this by not triggering the scam until you can win the dynasty with it, so that the other players don’t have a chance to adapt to the scammed gamestate.

From the Emperor’s point of view (or that of the playerbase in general), you can fix this with an early victory condition, to try to prevent the situation of a, e.g., a non-winning infinite-resources scam arising (by providing an outlet for it to win, so that it wouldn’t be non-winning). At another nomic I play, we often add “scam outlet victory conditions” which recognise resource gains of a magnitude that shouldn’t be possible (or other similar situations) and award wins when they occur (although interestingly, they aren’t “dynasty-ending” wins – your profit is converted into a win, but that removes the profit, and the game continues from more or less the state it was in).

From those dictionary definitions I would say that rolling a die to ultimately determine the winner of a game fitted the definition of “a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect”. We were, after all, rushing to patch things like unidling and reinitialising players in the final hours. I don’t think we had written a perfect rule.

The Attainment rule requires its poster to “include in the post description or table that plainly maps how the result of a dice roll will select a single Nomicer”. You posted both a die roll table and a described process, methods that would give potentially different outcomes, and observed that you found the description to be more “interesting”. I wouldn’t say that this post plainly mapped how the outcome of the die roll was going to select a Nomicer.

Per Kevan. Unless we can prove that the DICE function in the roller is perfectly fair, any dice roll is at best a heuristic.

While I do understand Josh and Kevan’s arguement, and I do see the part about an alternative heuristc as an irrelevant distraction, I do think it meets the requirements.

The post was required to state a way to select someone via dice roll. It did so, and added irrelevant info about an invalid other way to select a winner. Given that the method has no bearing on the dice roll or its method of selection, it’s able to be discarded.

The dice roll was made.

The winner of the dice roll was stated. An irrelevant winner was also announced, but this has no bearing on the dice roll. The winnder of the dice roll then declared victory.

Sure, but the problem is that ais couldn’t help himself. The requirement is that the post “plainly maps how the result of a dice roll will select a single Nomicer” - by attacking the premise he’s undermined the requirement to be plain, and as such the post itself is not a valid interpretation of the rule.

Actually, yeah, two methods are specified but it’s not actually stated which is being used for the dice roller result.
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It is stated, in the ruleset – it’s the heuristic that’s applied and the table is irrelevant.

@Josh:

You are misquoting the rule. The exact requirement in the rule is “Include in the post description or table that plainly maps how the result of a dice roll will select a single Nomicer, such that each Nomicer has a chance of being selected equal to their Equity as a proportion of all Equity in the game.” I did that, by including a table. The post includes other things as well, but that doesn’t change the fact that it includes a table, which is what the rule requires.

Additionally, the “couldn’t help myself” is also a rules requirement – I believe that the heuristic is required for the win to be valid. If I didn’t include it, I couldn’t legally make a DoV. If this DoV fails and someone else does a Roll Off after Hiatus ends, and doesn’t include it, their win would be invalid. If you are going to vote this down, therefore, I strongly recommend you make a CFJ to fix the rule before the hiatus ends.

(Or to summarise this very simply: the rule does not require the post to be plain. It simply requires it to include a table that is plain, and I did that.)

Quick CfJ raised to close the option for an admin to try the same scam again differently, if this DoV fails. I’ll leave what fix to make for a further discussion, if we need one.

The final step of an Announcement of Attainment requires a “dice roll as determined by the heuristic described in the post”. What is “the heuristic” being described your post, if it presents two different ones?

@Kevan: the table is not a heuristic, because it gives the correct probabilities, is not approximate, and does not operate by trial and error.

Note that if you consider that the table is a heuristic, as Josh apparently does, the action becomes impossible to perform at all, because the rule requires “each Nomicer has a chance of being selected equal to their Equity as a proportion of all Equity in the game” and if you consider the table to be approximate enough to be a heuristic, then the probabilities aren’t exact and thus the first step doesn’t work. But that part of the rule makes it clear that the table isn’t a heuristic; the table has to be exact (according to the rule), and yet a heuristic has to not be (according to the definition).

So, the first bullet point in the action says “Include in the post description or table that plainly maps how the result of a dice roll will select a single Nomicer”.

Your post has decribed a way the dice will will select a Nomicer, and how a heuristic will use the same dice roll to select a Nomicer, with no obligation for them to be the same person. Given that it’s literally the same dice roll described as being able to potentially select two different poeople, then it’s not saying how it will select a *single* Nomicer and so the first bullet point was not met.

Also, tables of values *could* be a heuristic. After all, you get normal distribution tables easily enough if you go looking for them, and they give results that you’re expected to just use even though they’re just an approximation of the correct values.

@SingularByte: The rule says “include in the post”, not “the post must consist only of”. That doesn’t preclude including, e.g., multiple different tables in the post; the rule doesn’t require the entire post to consist of a description of a fair method, it just requires the fair method to exist somewhere in the post.

An alternative scam I considered while planning this one was to place lots of different tables in the post, so that any dice roll would give me the win according to at least one table. That doesn’t quite work with the current wording of the rule (it gets past step 1 of the atomic action just fine, but gets stuck at step 3). It does, however, almost work, and might easily be made to accidentally work if an attempt is made to fix the heuristic issue.

It is really possible that the rule just doesn’t work as written and needs a substantial rewrite to be functional. This is the peril of a day 5 DoV.

I agree – I think the main alternatives here are that either a) I’ve won or b) the rule doesn’t function at all.

Part of the issue with buggy victory rules is that even if you see the issues in them, there’s an incentive to hold onto the scams for yourself rather than posting a fix proposal.

After carefully considering the arguments presented, I have to side with “the rule doesn’t function at all”. It’s unfortunate that the word “heuristic” was used and left the meaning of it as it applies to the dice roll debatable.

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