On Saturday 20 September 2008 09:35:06 pm ihope wrote: > On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 9:59 PM, Ben Caplan wrote: > > Proto-proto: Make power ordinal rather than cardinal, and > > organize the ruleset by power. Occasionally we would have rules > > like "rules below this one can be changed with AI >= 2". Early > > (powerful) rules would include "defining terms is secured". > > What do you mean by ordinal rather than cardinal? If you mean the > mathematical concept of ordinal numbers, rational numbers would > really do just as well, as every countable ordinal number is order > isomorphic to a set of rational numbers, not to mention that we > won't have infinitely many rules any time soon anyway.
I mean that we wouldn't have phrases like "this rule takes precedence over all other rules that would interfere with <scope>", we wouldn't have separate rules for precedence within equal power and unequal power, and everything would be much simpler. Actually, it's equivalent to just never having any two rules be of equal power. Letting power be any (unused) rational number would work well, I think, except that the distribution of powers could get weirdly lumpy over time. Allowing the Rulekeepor to reassign power as long as e didn't change the comparative (ordinal) power of any two rules might be ok. Pavitra
