BlogNomic: There (may)be Whales here

Sunday, May 06, 2018

Proposal: There (may)be Whales here

reached quorum 10-0 with 1 DEF enacted by card

Adminned at 07 May 2018 17:59:36 UTC

To the list of Positions, add “Lookout”.

Replace “A Position is free if it is held by no Sailor, or if the Position is Harpooneer or Deckhand.” with “A Position is free if it is held by no Sailor, or if the Position is Harpooneer, Deckhand, or Lookout.”

Add a new rule, “Whalespotting”:

The Whalecount is the number of whales in the vicinity of the Haniver, defaulting to 0. The Whalecount is privately tracked by the Narrator.

On Monday and Thursday, the Narrator should Whalespot. Whalespotting is an atomic action consisting of:
* Privately and randomly determining a new Whalecount, equal to DICE2-1, i.e. 0 or 1.
* For each Sailor that is a Lookout:
* Privately rolling DICE10. If it is less than the Vision Threshold, privately messaging that Sailor to inform them they may have spotted a whale. If it is not less than the Vision Threshold, privately messaging that Sailor to inform them they have not spotted a whale.

The Vision Threshold is 3 if the Whalecount is 0, or 8 if the Whalecount is 1.

Comments

Madrid:

06-05-2018 15:13:01 UTC

I suggest having the Whale appear on the map as well, on some cell, but it’s fine without it too.

pokes:

06-05-2018 15:21:04 UTC

I’m not sure exactly how to work that in - part of the intent here is that each Lookout has some little bit of information, not really enough to figure out by themselves if there’s really a whale, but likely enough if the lookouts coordinate (and tell the truth in coordination, if that forwards their goals). And non-lookouts will have to trust the lookout consensus, unable to consult the actual Whalecount. Having a canonical location on the map would spoil that. Maybe there could be a Whalecount for each cell? But that might end up mad complicated.

pokes:

06-05-2018 15:25:21 UTC

Maybe there’s a location for the one whale, and lookouts also find out where it is up to an error? Anyway, I like bringing the map into this but I think that would be better amended onto this instead of taking the complexity up to max in one go.

Madrid:

06-05-2018 15:28:58 UTC

OH, I see now.

Yeah, OK. Hrmmm. Maybe they each know a 2x2 grid on the map where there COULD be a whale? And if they coordinate/overlap their findings, they could more accurately find the whale.

pokes:

06-05-2018 15:58:03 UTC

Note: after doing some math on this, I bumped the Vision Thresholds from 3/6 to 3/8. 3/6 basically requires a whole quorum of just lookouts to get better than 80% accuracy, even if everyone is telling the truth.