Re: DIS: phew!
On May 31, 2007, at 10:00 PM, Ian Kelly wrote: On 5/31/07, Roger Hicks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've heard Annabel mentioned several times. Is there someplace I could find a synopsis of this crisis? I don't think that anybody has ever written up a thesis on the subject, so your best bet is probably just to go digging through the archives from January/February 2003.. In a nutshell, a player named Annabel played for a few months in 1999 and again for a couple of weeks in 2001. A couple of years later, it was revealed that Annabel was in fact an illegal dual registration and was never an actual player, throwing the game state into a morass of uncertainty, which was somewhat complicated by a lack of archives from before 2000. And this is why the Register's Report lists Murphy with two current registrations in the registration history. - Benjamin Schultz KE3OM OscarMeyr
Re: DIS: phew!
On 5/31/07, Ian Kelly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a nutshell, a player named Annabel played for a few months in 1999 and again for a couple of weeks in 2001. A couple of years later, it was revealed that Annabel was in fact an illegal dual registration and was never an actual player, throwing the game state into a morass of uncertainty, which was somewhat complicated by a lack of archives from before 2000. In particular, harvel held the office of Assessor for some time after Annabel deregistered, producing about 30 reports of adopted proposals. Back then we didn't have rule 2034, which pragmatises the resolution of Agoran decisions, and we had a long tradition, with occasional objectors, that players are persons, not avatars for persons. Together this suggests that when Annabel deregistered, harvel did as well, meaning that those reports were invalid and without effect. Ultimately, a plurality of Agorans decided to Pretend It Hadn't Happened to avoid a tedious recalculation of the gamestate. The lesson here is that while platonism may be Ideal, most of its shadowy instantiations are Bad. Some contend that the fall-out from the Annabel crisis was never properly resolved, and that we are no longer playing Agora as a result. This seems to come from a platonistic theory of identity. One could probably make an argument along the lines of Parfit's reduction of identity that post-Annabel Agora is ``close enough'' to pre-Annabel Agora to count as the same thing. -- Maud Lynn
Re: DIS: phew!
Maud Lynn wrote: Ultimately, a plurality of Agorans decided to Pretend It Hadn't Happened to avoid a tedious recalculation of the gamestate. More precisely, they adopted a proposal to the effect of the entire gamestate is hereby set to what it would have been if Annabel had been a separate person all along. This was generally compared to the Quantum Crisis from several years earlier: Due to a rule bug discovered several months after the fact, it turned out that a massive proposal wasn't adopted after all, leaving much of the gamestate (including the identities of the Promotor and Assessor) dependent on several points of interpretation. The crisis was resolved by collapsing the quantum states, first those offices (all players except X announced I resign as Promotor and name X as my successor, similar for Assessor) and then the rest of the gamestate (adopting a proposal to the effect of the original massive proposal is deemed to have been adopted). Arguments against the Annabel fix generally fell into the following camps: 1) You haven't ensured that it really did take effect. A similar series of conditional resignations took place, but was not 100% comprehensive. 2) Resetting the gamestate en masse is bad form. These players presumably object to ratification for the same reason. 3) I could recalculate the gamestate, just give me some time. Not enough players were interested. (If they had been so interested in the Quantum Crisis, for instance, then they could have collapsed the CotC and then resolved the remaining issues via CFJ; but with somewhere from 10 to 20 different possible gamestates just from looking at Officer identities, never mind everything else, it would have taken bloody ages.)
Re: DIS: phew!
Ed Murphy wrote: Quantum Crisis A misnomer. I think of it as the 2662 crisis, or the Points crisis, because the issue was over whether proposal 2662, abolishing Points (for the first time), had passed. I only used the term Quantum for the imagery of the quantum wave function being progressively collapsed to a single state. somewhere from 10 to 20 different possible gamestates just from looking at Officer identities, Also misunderstood. I looked at only the identites of certain critical Officers, plus the Scorekeepor out of sheer curiosity. Not all offices, and not only the ones we really needed. As I recall, there were fourteen possible sets of officer identities that I ended up with. That was from regarding scores and proposal results as totally unknown; it wouldn't have taken a huge amount more work to narrow it down further. The sets of possible holders for each individual office were much smaller. (I don't have a copy of my report on that research, though I have clear memories of the lengthy session with Vanyel's archive as it then was. I have an RCS record of the quantum reports that I produced semi-regularly.) Anyway, glad to have become a model of how to resolve a crisis. Rigour R us, and all that. -zefram
Re: DIS: phew!
I've heard Annabel mentioned several times. Is there someplace I could find a synopsis of this crisis? BobTHJ On 5/31/07, Kerim Aydin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just wanted to congratulate everyone on the second-most busy month in agoranomic.org discussion history (measured by bytes in archive file). Just thought we might make it, but conversation died out in the final few hours. Just barely lost out to April 2005; April 2005 had a April Fools joke that resulted in posting repeated copies of most of the ruleset in discussion forum, so maybe that's not a measure of discussion volume. On the other hand, current archives seem to have more html junk so maybe it's not a fair comparison. In my day, we posted pure text and were *lucky*. Bronze medal goes to January 2003, the height of the Annabel crisis. That was true discussion, in text, that was. Well done! -Goethe
Re: DIS: phew!
On 5/31/07, Kerim Aydin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just barely lost out to April 2005; April 2005 had a April Fools joke that resulted in posting repeated copies of most of the ruleset in discussion forum, so maybe that's not a measure of discussion volume. On the other hand, current archives seem to have more html junk so maybe it's not a fair comparison. In my day, we posted pure text and were *lucky*. We also had a rather large spike in activity around that time, as I recall. -root
Re: DIS: phew!
Ian Kelly wrote: On 5/31/07, Roger Hicks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've heard Annabel mentioned several times. Is there someplace I could find a synopsis of this crisis? I don't think that anybody has ever written up a thesis on the subject, so your best bet is probably just to go digging through the archives from January/February 2003.. In a nutshell, a player named Annabel played for a few months in 1999 and again for a couple of weeks in 2001. A couple of years later, it was revealed that Annabel was in fact an illegal dual registration and was never an actual player, throwing the game state into a morass of uncertainty, which was somewhat complicated by a lack of archives from before 2000. Some contend that the fall-out from the Annabel crisis was never properly resolved, and that we are no longer playing Agora as a result. -root It would be interesting to make a list of all the scams/disputes/oddities that have happened over the years.
