On 6/24/2019 11:17 PM, Jason Cobb wrote:
This is probably the easiest way to do this:
For each number X that is an integral multiple of 0.1 not less than 1.0 and
not exceeding 5.0, I do the following:
{
I declare intent, with X Agoran Consent, to banish The Ritual, pursuant to
Rule 2596 ("The Ritual").
I engage in DIABOLICAL LAUGHTER about the intent created in the previous
sentence.
}
Is this legal? At least one of them will work at whatever time I end up
doing it, right?
tl;dr it probably works, but some recent rule changes *might* mean some
old precedents need to be revisited via CFJ.
Longer answer: There's some deep precedents around this type of thing.
Strictly speaking you haven't declared intent at all these different
levels - you've just *said* you did. To actually do it, you have to
write all of those out (all 501 of them). However, it was long-ago
recognized that absolutely requiring 501 statements was a pain in the
butt for everyone and was actually *less* clear than a loop like you
did, because someone could hide something in a long list. So we (wholly
through precedent) found that "shorthand" works (e.g. a loop procedure)
- on the condition that it would be fairly trivial to write out the
whole thing anyway.
The logic is as long as you're just saving us all a little time and the
looping is really clear, it's just a shorthand. But if you try to do
things that would be "hard to impossible" to write out in full, it fails
because you're saying you did something that you couldn't practically do.
So, for example, you couldn't use an infinite loop to make an infinite
series of intents. You couldn't use a finite but "excessively large"
loop either - there's an email size limit on the archives (a bit bigger
than the FLR, idk exactly) so the idea is if it was really long, we'd
say "since a fully-written out email wouldn't be possible to send, a
loop of that size doesn't work either".
In your case 501 single-line intents is pretty small, so no problem.
HOWEVER. That's the general case for all actions. We recently changed
the langauge for intents in particular. We changed:
> 1. A person (the initiator) announced intent to perform the
> action, unambiguously and clearly specifying the action and
> method(s)
to:
> 1. A person (the initiator) conspicuously and without obfuscation
> announced intent to perform the action, unambiguously and
> clearly specifying the action and method(s)
The addition of "conspicuously and without obfuscation" was purposefully
added for the sole purpose of cracking down on attempts to hide intents,
including through algorithmic processes that are opaque. This is one of
the strictest communication standards in the rules, and we haven't put
too much case law into figuring out what it means.
Does your loop meet these standards - it seems *reasonably* clear to me,
but in light of the new stringent standards I wouldn't be too horribly
surprised if a CFJ found the other way.
