The Holding Game #558

i also do note: if you really wanted, you do have the power to make the State make the Bank have less ambiguous wording.

• when writing "Player u MoneyRequest", i did intend for u to only match single words
• i think it is likely that i will want to write other such patterns in the future, matching only on single words, more often than i will want to match on multiple words
• i don't want to be writing "where u is a single word" all the time.
• this discussion is otherwise not particularly interesting to me; the pattern-matching notation is supposed to be incidental to the mechanics of objects and holding

i consider it a flaw that there is no mechanism for judging disputes in the rules; i also consider it a flaw that there is no way to modify the rules except by me in cases of flaws. i add this text to the end of the rules:

If an Object with the Name "Legislature" exists, it may make arbitrary changes to the text of these rules, as an Action. If an Object with the Name "Judiciary" exists, it may make binding judgements on disputes between players, as an Action.

I have the State create an Object named "Legislature" and an object named "Judiciary". Through transitive sole-holdingness i have Judiciary make the following judgement:

When a pattern is being matched against the name of an Object, unless otherwise specified, metasyntactic variables in that pattern match against single words only.

I can't see any foolproof way to make an Object (Player) be bound by regulations they can't just delete. BUT I guess if all agreements between parties are done through the same two Objects (which are held by noone but eachother), then it can be constructed so removing yourself from being bound also means that all other agreements are broken. And so, assuming all agreements are balanced or you have other agreements that you don't want broken, then you're tied.

But this neccesitates Players be held by only these Objects (or other objects which recursing up the holding tree end up with these Objects as the root), otherwise the decision to do an action needs agreement from the other non-bound holder…

it may not be possible to bind the player, but you could make an object and then bind that object, i think. so you could put resources into escrow under an object that will only release them when some condition is met.

ohhhh that's very true! make the two objects holding eachother (is an object able to hold itself? the rules say "other objects") have regulations, rather than trying to make yourself bound by the two objects.

also, i don't want to be a dictator forever. if someone can think of a cool way to make the magic powers of the State, Legislature and Judiciary more democratic, i am open to hearing it. (i was thinking about making each of these solely-held by an object called Government, which will do anything it is told by an apioforum poll that gets more votes for than against. but then there is a problem with vote-stuffing with multiple fake accounts)

is an object able to hold itself?

no

how do I... make a poll

make a new thread, then it's in [configure thread]

ogh can they not be made as posts.. that's annoying

you could just say that if sockpuppering is discovered all polls involving that pupper are re-evaluated ignoring their votes and the state of everything is re-evaluated

which could cause a lot of machination and weirdness but I imagine

mhm excterly

ogh can they not be made as posts.. that's annoying

polls are always threads, because each vote is part of a post. that lets you explain a rationale for your vote at the same time that you make it.

you could just say that if sockpuppering is discovered all polls involving that pupper are re-evaluated ignoring their votes and the state of everything is re-evaluated

which could cause a lot of machination and weirdness but I imagine

i imagine a rule like that would mean people don't bother sockpuppeting in the first place, meaning such machination would never actually need to happen

because each vote is part of a post

I see not reason this couldn't work within in existing thread… but i should not mumble about apioforum without volunteering to alter it, maybe

you can add a poll to an existing thread just fine.* but you can't have more than one poll in a thread at a time (maybe this limitation could be removed, but the ui might be a bit confusing), and also you can't close a poll except by deleting it entirely (which is a more serious limitation that i intend to do something about soon)

*but only the creator of the thread (or someone with p_manage_threads permission, i think) can add or modify polls