There's a lot of good stuff to chew on here, but I jumped right to this
part because your earlier comment on R101 (when you posted the graph)
intrigued me.
> Second, Rule 101 ("The Game of Agora") must get special treatment. By the
> text parsing strategy, R101 depends on: R2449, R869, R2141, and R468. This
> does not model how the ruleset actually works. Thus, the dependencies of
> R101 are manually removed, and dependencies on R101 are added to each of
> those rules.
> The other is Rule 101 ("The Game of Agora"); this is the
> rule that defines the game in its entirety, and thus it cannot possibly
> depend on anything else.
I think, historically, the text parsing strategy gave something closer to
"how the ruleset works". This form of R101 is a late addition and not
really "defining" so much as "describing" IMO. To me, it's the equivalent
to an "The Object of the Game" you find in typical boardgame rules.
For example, you might say "The object of the game is to get all your
piggies home to the brick house before the wolf puffs three times." This is
good at orienting a new player as to the theme of the game, and tells you
key terms to look out for when reading the detailed rules, but it defines
nothing - you need to read the more detailed rules to know what a piggy,
brick house, wolf etc. are in game terms. And in fact you could drop that
whole summary and usually the detailed rules describe all this stuff. It's
a little easier to comprehend the detailed rules if you have an outline in
your mind as you read them, but it's not necessary.
In terms of "late addition", the "Agora is a game of Nomic" was implicit
in the title of R1698 before it was put in R101, "the game never ends"
was in and out of some version of R2449, and of course the operative terms
(Rules, Players, Fora, Actions) all have their main definitions elsewhere.
I think you could repeal R101 entirely and it would hardly change the game
at all, except it might lead to a few more CFJs about whether the game had
ended and so on.
So I would say R101 is entirely dependent on the rules that contain those
definitions.
-G.
