On Thu, 2 Oct 2008, ais523 wrote: > Does anyone know why rule 2127 was created in > the first place? I'm wondering if the bar was intentionally set high to > discourage that sort of scam.
I wrote it, because I thought it would be fun to allow just the sort of activity that's now going on (sell tickets, endorsements, etc., deals, betrayals, etc. etc.) And of course some scams. And I think it worked, and most uses have been very legitimate, enjoyable and sometimes unexpected. It's meant to be reasonably strict to prevent paradoxes and limit scams but mainly to prevent excessive work on the part of the Assessor (e.g. not require massive searching of archives for the "Y=3" that was posted three years ago, and prohibiting things like "if BobTHJ has cast an odd number of votes in the last 3 years[strictly speaking available to anyone], FALSE, otherwise TRUE"). So it wasn't meant to prevent direct and obvious references to a contract (or even an official report) just because the report was published a week before the voting started. A good legislative clarification that would get the original intent better would be replacing "information published during..." with something like "information referenced in the voting message and readily available and resolvable by any reasonable player without requiring unreasonable effort, between the end of the voting period and the resolution of the decision..." That would leave the courts to define squishy terms like "readily available" and "reasonable" and "unreasonable" of course. -Goethe
