On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > > On Thu, 14 Jan 2010, ais523 wrote: >> Valid point, I'm pretty convinced that ratification is broken, now. >> (Possibly by being too ambiguous to have an effect.) I still don't think >> the general concept of ratification is too weak to provide a mechanism >> around 1698; but the specific implementation we have at the moment may >> be. > > I agree. I think we tried to be parsimonious and general by using the > phrase "the gamestate is minimally modified..." but it leaves far too > much open. Does it modify peoples votes or just the fact of adoption? > Does it modify state or whether events happened? (either one could be > the "minimal" modification depending on circumstances). And it's very > unclear, when ratification happens, what event caused the values to > change.
No. The Rules are part of the gamestate. "Whether person X submitted a valid ballot on proposal Y" is not. It is a statement incorporating the gamestate-- specifically, what the Rules were at the time X attempted to submit the ballot-- but it is not stored in the gamestate, and ratification cannot alter reality. "Whether proposal X was adopted" is also not part of the gamestate. Either it was adopted at a certain time, or it was not, according to the rules then. Ratification does not affect it at all. If the fact that proposal X was adopted self-ratifies, then we have to figure out what would happen if it was, in fact, adopted when voting results were published. It was not adopted because not enough people voted for it-- it is IMPOSSIBLE that it was adopted, if you would like to use that wording. Agora is a game that follows rules, yet we are pretending the gamestate did not change according to the rules at a specific instant of time. This is a contradiction, and yes, anything follows, but it is not unreasonably hard to imagine that at that time, some illegal action magically occurred. A "removable discontinuity". What was it? There are lots of actions that could have led to the proposal's not being adopted. Infinitely many, in fact. Here are a few: - Rule 955 was amended to state that all decisions have an outcome of ADOPTED, Rule 101 (i) notwithstanding - Rule 106 was amended to state that proposals are adopted regardless of the outcome of the decision, same - some AGAINST-voter's voting limit was 0, Rule 1950 notwithstanding - the outcome was ADOPTED, Rule 955 notwithstanding - the proposal was adopted, Rule 106 notwithstanding Out of all these possibilities, the last three are all equivalent and provide the _minimal_ modification to the gamestate: the proposal's effects are carried out during ratification. It doesn't matter which one was chosen: whether a voting limit _was_ 0 or the proposal _was_ adopted is not part of the gamestate, so the only actual gamestate modification is the different ruleset that, after the hypothetical action, we would have. The first two possibilities (and more!) are also valid but would require additional gamestate modifications, so they are not chosen. Well, there's an issue (maybe "minimally" wasn't a good idea). Here's another possibility: - the proposal was adopted, but did not take effect, Rule 106 notwithstanding This requires _no_ changes to the gamestate, and I suppose the ratification rule would choose that. -- -c.
