On Sat, 2023-05-20 at 23:43 -0400, Janet Cobb via agora-discussion wrote: > Actually, in general persons ceasing to exist is likely to cause > problems, and the current ruleset is careful to avoid it (R869/51's "is > or ever was"; you remain an Agoran person after you die). > > I'm not sure there's a good solution here. Having disabled Raybots just > sit around doing nothing isn't ideal. Auditing the whole ruleset for > issues caused by this is probably good to do anyway but error-prone (and > future proposals are reasonably likely to introduce new problems).
We've had artificial persons in the past, and they ceased to exist with no real issues. That predated Promises, which probably need a fix to cease to exist when their creator does. The main potential issue I could think of is "what happens to a CFJ if its judge ceases to exist", but it turns out that there's a specific allowance for that in rule 991 (the nonexistent person remains assigned as the judge). Likewise, rule 649 allows non-persons to bear patent titles (oddly, it even allows non-persons to be *awarded* patent titles). According to the FLR annotations, we were fixing bugs with loss-of-personhood as recently as 2020, so it's historically been considered desirable to have rules that make sense in that context. I checked every use of "person" in the rules to find uses that might cause issues: * Rule 1742 - what happens to a contract if a party ceases to exist? * Rule 2659 - stamps - already addressed in my proto * Rule 2644 - lockout on Stone win condition ends early if the winner ceases to exit - probably not going to matter in practice * Rule 2464 - tournaments have no Gamemaster if their creator is no longer a person, but work just fine in that state * Rule 869 - playerhood - already addressed in my proto * Rule 1023 - definition of "round" - may need fixing, although the definition is used only to fix the First Speaker rule, which wouldn't be affected * Rule 1728 - if an officer tabls an intent as an official action of their office, then ceases to be a person, the new officer can't then resolve the intent if it's an action without objection: potentially buggy, but unlikely to be a major issue in practice * Rule 2530 - potentially weird if a proposal's coauthor ceases to be a person, we might want to reinforce that (although I don't think anything is actually breakable there) * Rule 2493 - regulations - the definitions here break if the promulgator of a regulation ceases to be a person, although I don't think that causes any actual rules to break as a consequence * Rule 2127 - conditional votes - an attempt to endorse a voter breaks if the voter ceases to be a person (even though the non-person's vote is still valid) * Rule 2210 - self-ratification - not broken, only persons can CoE but the CoE remains valid even if the CoEer ceases to be a person * Rule 2478 - investigation of infractions - potentially broken, could most simply be fixed by allowing Favoritism towards non-players * Rule 991 - CFJs - judgehood works fine, but recusal is broken Probably the best approach here is to ensure that loss-of-personhood works: it's something that used to happen at Agora all the time (there have been many eras where a couple of conspiring players could create and destroy an legal-fiction person pretty much at will, and the rules used to use the terminology "first-class person" and "second-class person" so that the legal fnctions could be easily identified). I suspect that regardless of how Raybots goes, it's worth a big fix proposal to make sure that loss of personhood is something that the rule can handle. This does make me think that something like the Raybots proposal is worthwhile, though: the best way to ensure that the ruleset can handle loss of personhood is to make sure it's something that regularly gets tested, thus incentivising us to fix the bugs in it. (The proposal's inspiration came from the direction of "legal-fiction persons would be interesting to have again and we haven't had them for a while, can we find a way of doing them that's significantly different from what we've had before?".) -- ais523
