On Sun, 2026-01-11 at 09:39 -0800, Edward Murphy via agora-business wrote: > Each player CAN, by announcement, push the Boulder, unless e was > the most recent player to do so. When a player pushes the Boulder, > if e correctly and unambiguously specified its previous Height, > then its Height is increased by 1; otherwise, its Height is set to > 0. At the beginning of each week, if the Boulder was not pushed in > the previous week, then its Height is set to 0. The Absurdor > SHOULD list the largest Height of the Boulder ever reached in eir > report. > > Upon a correct announcement that the Boulder's Height is at least > 1000, each player who pushed it at least once since its Height was > last 0 Reaches the Summit, then its Height is set to 0. When a > player Reaches the Summit, e wins the game. > > [Inspired by a Discord bot on another server that implements the same > challenge. I've been watching it for a couple months now; it's failed > in the 300-600 range about three times, one of which was my fault due > to not scrolling down properly.]
What's to prevent two players just cooperating to send 500 emails each, alternating, and generating as many wins as they liked like that? It'd be annoying to do by hand but fairly easy to do by bot. With the current wording, it could also be done via promise, or via contract-defined act-on-behalf in order to get it all done in a single message. In general I suspect that this sort of challenge doesn't adapt to email well – if the target is high enough to make it nontrivial, the number of emails required will be large enough to become very annoying for people using the lists. -- ais523
