On Wed, 2023-02-15 at 08:40 -0800, Kerim Aydin via agora-official wrote: > The below CFJ is 4008. I assign it to ais523. > > =============================== CFJ 4008 =============================== > > It costs 2 hooves to get a jersey for a horse and add a horse to > that horse's pull. > > ==========================================================================
The existing wording of the rule, "Each player CAN … get a jersey for a specified horse by paying 1 hoof, also specifying a horse which is thereby added to that horse's pull by paying 1 hoof", is clearly confused. Nonetheless, it's necessary to work out what this means. First, let's compare with some existing actions and existing rules to work out how to parse this. In Agoran rules, the phrase "CAN X by Y", where X is an action, typically means "it is possible to take action X using mechanism Y". The mechanism is in some sense part of the action, because sometimes a player can take the same action via two different mechanisms, and the mechanism matters. As a simple example, consider the action "gain 1 hoof by announcement" – Alexia's owner can do this once per week, and can also do this once per month, and the exact mechanism matters because it will affect which of the timers gets counted against. On the other hand, these actions each also have the mechanism of "by announcement". So in a sense, there's a "layering" of mechanisms going on; the mechanism is part of the action, but the action+mechanism pair is what's specified by the rule, and thus the "action" part of the action+mechanism pair can also contain mechanisms. The consequence is that some actions have multiple rules-specified mechanisms, not as alternatives, but in the sense that a use of the action has to fit all the mechanisms. Players other than Alexia's owner can perform the action "gain 1 hoof by announcement" once per week, so the "inner" mechanism is "by announcement" and the "outer" mechanism is "by announcement once per week" and they can only perform the action by complying with both of these simultaneously. There are plenty of cases where resolving this sort of nested mechanism is easy. For example a hypothetical rule, "A player CAN nkep by announcement by announcement" is redundant, but there is only one plausible meaning of it, and it would be triggered by a player posting "I nkep by announcement" (something that would also work even if the rule was simply "A player CAN nkep by announcement"). Posting the mechanism along with the action when acting by announcement is normally unnecessary (compare "I nkep"), but it might be useful if there were another method of nkepping specified in the rules at the same time, and is permitted even if there isn't. Now, let's apply this reasoning to the rule at hand. "Each player CAN … if e has not already taken [one of these actions] this week … get a jersey for a specified horse by paying 1 hoof, also specifying a horse which is thereby added to that horse's pull by paying 1 hoof" is a nested set of action+mechanism pairs. If there were another comma near the end, this would clearly parse as "A players CAN take the action 'get a jersey for a specified horse by paying 1 hoof, also specifying a horse which is thereby added to that horse's pull' by paying 1 hoof, if e has not taken a weekly race action this week". The weird punctuation makes the parsing a little less clear, but this still seems to be the most sensible parse (as I, the caller, and the gratuitous arguments all agree, this is clearly intended to all be one action). As such, all that needs to be decided is to work out what it means to take a fee-based action via a fee-based method. Rule 2579 specifies the requirements to take a fee-based action: you must specify what the fee is, and then the fee automatically gets destroyed or transferred as a consequence of taking the action (and if it can't be, the action fails). This is a consequence of making the announcement that states that the action is being taken. This means that when taking a fee-based action via a fee-based method, what the rules check for, for each of the fees, is a) whether the correct fee was announced, b) whether the fee CAN be (and thus automatically was) paid, c) whether the fee was for the sole purpose of using "that method" to perform that action. If you're trying to pay 1 hoof to perform the action in question, are these requirements satisfied? a) is satisfied by announcing "by paying 1 hoof"; b) is satisfied if you CAN pay 1 hoof; so what about c)? This is in effect a question about whether "that method" is the same for the two "by paying 1 hoof" requirements; if this counts as the same method each time, then the payment of 1 hoof is sufficient to satisfy both requirements simultaneously, whereas if it counts as two different methods, you would need to pay 1 hoof twice (as opposed to paying 2 hooves). The rules are not explicit on whether two methods are considered to be identical or not. The implication from the letter of several rules (e.g. 1789, which effectively considers two deregistrations by different Writs of FAGE to have been done by the same method, and 1728, which lists some examples of methods) is that a method is a simple restriction along the lines of "with 3 support" or "by announcement"; this is an implication rather than an a clear consequence. Other rules, such as 2555 and 2566, imply that "which rule/sentence defines the action" is also part of the method; my understanding is that this definition is also the closest to game custom. (Looking at the difference in the size of the rule numbers here, likely the concept of "method" has evolved over time.) However, either of these definitions gives the same answer for the rule in question: the method is either "by paying 1 hoof" in both cases, or "by paying 1 hoof as a weekly race action, as defined by the second bullet point of rule 2672" in both cases. As such, the two "by paying 1 hoof" are each defining the same method for the same action, and therefore (by the letter of rule 2579) the same payment is sufficient to satisfy both requirements to pay 1 hoof simultaneously – you need to destroy 1 hoof for the sole purpose of performing that action by that method, and incur two such requirements to do so, but "that method" is the same for both requirements and thus the purpose of that destruction is correct for both. (As a side note, if two different payments were specified, you would need to pay both of them, as neither of them would satisfy the requirement to pay the other – it's only the fact that the same method was specified twice that makes this work.) I judge CFJ 2008 FALSE. (But really, that rule should be fixed anyway.) -- ais523 Judge, CFJ 2008
