On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Ed Murphy emurph...@socal.rr.com wrote:
scshunt wrote:
Based on the arguments to CFJs 3121 3122, it appears that the
consensus among Agorans is that when an infinite rule-defined process
occurs, it does indeed occur infinitely, but instantaneously, leaving
the game in a single state afterwards. While the situation giving rise
to 3122 failed on a technicality similar to that which plagued the
original CFJs on this matter (see CFJ 3246), this one does not have
the same issues.
In eir arguments to CFJ 3122, H. Judge Murphy proposes that any such
action would necessarily introduce ambiguity into the gamestate and
fail, but I do not agree with this line of reasoning. I see nothing in
the rules to indicate that an ambiguity causes an action to fail
inherently; rather, it is the requirement of unamibiguousness written
out in Rule 478 that prevents actions by announcement from being
ambiguous. This does not prevent other ambiguity and, indeed,
ambiguity has been held to exist in situations historically---there
have been . There is, additionally, a poltiical aspect to it, as
outlined by H. Judge Pavitra in CFJ 2650, which is a vital read for
anyone wishing to settle this case.
Minor nits: My arguments to CFJ 3121 (not 3122) were not based on
ambiguity, but rather on the rules attempting to deem some finite set
of messages as legally equivalent to an infinite set of messages (which
would be physically impossible to send directly). However, since the
rest of your judgement implicitly refutes the prior precedent anyway,
and is not obviously unreasonable in doing so, I won't bother pushing
for reconsideration.
I do think that this makes it too easy to set up infinite chains and
get turtles out of them (e.g. by fudging someone's posture, which has
no LFD-style escape clause), but that probably needs to be fixed via
legislation at this point.
Switches do as well, and they are the primary other source of game
state. But there are indeed parts of game state without this safety,
and I agree, they should be fixed by legislation.
There is the question, then, of whether it was the same ruble over and
over again or all of G's rubles. There is no particular indication of
one over the other. However, Rule 2166 again comes to the rescue with
Instances of a currency with the same owner are fungible. This can,
and in my view, should be interpreted as implying that the distinction
between rubles of the same owner is irrelevant since they are always
interchangeable, and that distinction is hence effectively
non-existent. Common sense and good of the game then lead us to apply
the simplest interpretation to the situation, which is that only one
ruble's worth of ambiguity is created. As for CFJ 3256, it the rules
simply do not allow for drawing this distinction with currencies.
Moreover, by using the word currency, it implies that, much like a
real-life currency, in a situation like this, the actual details of
the changing of hands are not important, hence I judge CFJ 3256 to be
IRRELEVANT.
Another minor nit: A significantly more reasonable parsing of CFJ 3256
(precisely because rubles are fungible) is transferred [a total of]
exactly one, or to make it more explicit:
I considered this, but that, too, is irrelevant. If people want me to
stick to an interpretation, I'll do so if the judgement is
reconsidered.
-scshunt
