Goethe wrote:
> Solutions proposed:
> 1. judicially declare all actions performed by "annabel" to be
> (retroactively) ineffective because, in retrospect, the messages didn't
> constitute clear communication as to whom they applied to (I still think
> this would have and did work, hence no crisis, but this was a minority
> view).
I don't remember this being brought up. It would have required
recalculating the gamestate to account for the removal of Annabel's
purported actions, except that #3 later patched over it.
> 2. have everyone deregister except 1 person whom we were sure was still
> a player and had been a player throughout the whole time. That person would
> become the holder of every office and proposals would have a quorum of 1.
> We would then be sure whom the holder of every office was. E could then
> ratify by proposal the recent rulesets and officer reports and everyone could
> re-register going on as before. (I think this fix wouldn't work/is broken
> now,
> when offices can be vacant and the speaker is no longer the default
> officeholder?) Anyway, we never did this, maybe because we never convinced
> everyone to deregister en masse.
A similar solution was applied rigorously back around 1997. A proposal
revamping the economy was purportedly adopted, then months later was
discovered to have failed. Zefram worked out about a dozen potential
values of the gamestate just for who held which offices, depending on
interpretation (the "Quantum Crisis"), then we all agreed to patch it
as follows:
a) All but one player announced "If I am Promotor, then I resign,
naming <the one player> as my successor". This collapsed the
quantum states for that portion of the gamestate.
b) The holder of Assessor was similarly collapsed.
c) A fix proposal was adopted, effectively ratifying the adoption
of the original economic revamp proposal.
> 3. pass a proposal ratifying the gamestate without #2 first. I think we
> did this, but I think several people always thought this didn't solve the
> problem (and we still haven't solved the problem) because we didn't do #2
> first.
We did (that was one of my proposals); it basically ratified the legal
fiction that actions performed via Maud's and Annabel's e-mail addresses
during the time in question were performed by separate persons.
