On Mon, 2026-07-13 at 13:05 -0400, Gregory Hayes via agora-business
wrote:
> I note that on July 1st, 2026, the Land Managor, Murphy, violated
> Rule 2710 ("Genetic Modification") by failing to set a randomly
> selected attribute of a randomly selected Crop to a randomly selected
> value during the Crop Season of June 2026.
>
> On the one hand, this is not the first time this has happened. I am
> actually not sure if the accused has EVER performed this duty of the
> Land Managor. On the other hand, Murphy wears a lot of hats, and
> performs the rest of eir duties competently, so I suspect this is
> probably just an honest mistake and therefore should probably not be
> punished. This note is more just to remind em that the duty exists
> more than anything else.
I agree that this requirement exists, and that Murphy did not perform
it. This means that this is an actual infraction.
On the other hand, the requirement appears to be impossible to fulfil
in the intended manner, which raises the possibility that the
infraction may have been automatically forgiven. The requirement starts
"Once per Crop Season, the Land Managor CAN and SHALL by announcement
randomly select a type of Crop that was in-season during the previous
season". "By announcement" means that you perform it by sending a
public message stating that you perform it. However, sending a public
message stating that you make a random selection does not actually make
a random selection, and making the random selection with some other
timing (say, before you send the message) would not fulfil the
requirement.
There is one non-obvious way in which the requirement could potentially
be fulfilled: sending the message via an email relay that performs a
random dice roll and appends it to the message. Such email relays have,
at least historically, existed and have occasionally been used by
officers to perform duties that require random selections. That said, I
don't remember seeing any used at Agora for ages, and it might be
nontrivial nowadays to persuade the lists to accept messages sent like
that. Emails also have headers, and some of them contain content that
is effectively random and unpredictable to the person sending the email
(e.g. the DKIM-Signature header added by agoranomic.org); it would in
theory be possible to work out the probability distribution of the
header and then convert it into a random choice with the required
probabilities.
There is another non-obvious way in which the requirement could
potentially be fulfilled: the rule *defines* sending an email saying "I
randomly select a type of Crop that was in-season during the previous
season" to do such a selection, which may override the physical reality
of how emails generally work (and the fact that the result would just
cause gamestate uncertainty because nobody would know which Crop had
actually been selected).
So was it automatically forgiven? Here are the potentially relevant
grounds for automatic forgiveness:
R2531(3) (failure to take an action that you CANNOT perform, through no
fault of your own);
R2531(5) (could not avoid the infraction when exercising the highest
reasonably possible standard of care);
R2531(6) (a nonzero punishment would be blatantly and obviously
unfair).
I don't think R2531(3) applies; the rules state that the Land Managor
CAN perform the action in question and give a mechanism for doing so,
so the action appears to be possible by definition. (In particular,
attempting to perform the action via the stated mechanism would
probably be sufficient in practice to avoid the infraction, even though
nobody is unclear of the effects).
I don't think R2531(5) applies either, although it's close. If Murphy
had exercised the highest reasonably possible standard of care, it
would have involved noticing that the action was buggy early enough to
potentially do something about it (like asking for ways to fulfil the
requirement, or changing the rules to fix the bug). This makes it
likely that the action actually would have been performed in time; a
month is a pretty wide time window. (Note that I don't think it's
reasonable to expect players to exercise the highest reasonably
possible standard of care all the time for everything; it's usual to
care more about some parts of the game than others. But the rule seems
to have a fairly narrow wording.)
R2531(6) also doesn't apply: a nonzero punishment might be unfair if
Murphy had tried and failed to fulfil the requirement (even if it were
possible to fulfil), but it isn't obviously unfair for a player who
appears to have overlooked at it and didn't even attempt.
As such, I note the infraction in question, specifying 1 Blot. (The
Base is 0, and the Class is at the default of 2; and the middle of the
range seems reasonable for a missed non-inconsequential regular office
duty: this has after all been changing the Agoriculture subgame away
from its intended gameplay.) That said, I think it is reasonable to
remove the penalty, given the unusual circumstances involved, so I'll
put it up to a vote: I intend, with Agoran Consent, to forgive that
infraction.
--
ais523
Referee
