ais523 wrote
CFJ, barring Jason: I won the game by Taking Over The Economy today.
We therefore need to interpret what it means for the device to have a judge assigned. I can see three main possibilities: either there isn't any way for this to occur, and thus the Device is never in a state of having a judge assigned (even though it is possible to assign the Device to a person, this is distinct from assigning the person to the Device); or else the action of assigning the device to a person causes the person to become an assigned judge for that Device (which is how the Arbitor interpreted it, possibly as a counterscam attempt); or else the concept of a judge being assigned to a Device is a concept that's based on the mental state of the Arbitor (i.e. the Arbitor considers that player to be the primary judge for the Device).
With the second interpretation, there's some inclarity because the "device changes" as a consequence of being assigned, which would turn it on (the Device is a switch with two states, so changing it would presumably cause it to change state) – and that causes the part of the rule about judge assignment to Devices to turn off, so it may cause the assignment to disappear in the same way that repealing the rules defining something normally cause that thing to disappear.
FWIW, my take is that "assigning the device to a person" should be interpreted as analogous to what it most closely resembles, assigning a CFJ to a person: namely, it establishes a symmetric relationship, which (even if it isn't a switch) is still governed by Rule 1586 (Definition and Continuity of Entities), and thus doesn't cease to exist just because the conditions for changing it no longer hold; that would require actually repealing the clause, or else having it explicitly say something like "X is only defined while <condition>" and then having that condition be false. Thus, the scam failed because the condition "device is not assigned" was only true the first time. But I agree with interpreting the device "changing" or being "deactivated" as flipping it, and that tabled intents in general can be resolved multiple times.
