I am Andrew Hyer, currently living in New Jersey and working in New York (in the finance industry).
aphyer
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Huh. I believe I tagged them both the same way, but I don’t get tag notifications on my own posts. Can someone who isn’t me comment on whether they got the notification?
D&D Sci Thanksgiving: the Festival Feast Evaluation & Ruleset
I’m very proud of this scenario. (Even if you’re confident you aren’t going to play it, I think you could read the wrapup doc and in particular the section on ‘Bonus Objective’ so you can see what it involved).
It accomplished a few things I think are generally good in these scenarios:
There was underlying structure that players could uncover, which created emergent complexity in the output but made sense with the theme once the underlying ruleset was revealed/discovered.
Human thought about e.g. the theme and what patterns would be reasonable to observe was valuable, the puzzle was not optimally-solved just by feeding the data into a model and calling it a day.
Multiple levels of solution were possible, from a decent solution with little effort up to a more-involved solution that went further and dug into the underlying structure.
And also it managed to trick many players with a surprising-yet-thematic twist :P
...oops. It turns out that efficiently solving the Knapsack Problem is hard.
On looking in, it looks like my confusion with python variables means that, while your soldiers will always find a valid solution if it’s reachable by a few straightforward rules, they will sometimes fail to find the solution if it wouldn’t be reachable like that.[1]
This doesn’t affect the performance of any submitted team (since the teams were evaluated using the same code that the dataset was generated with), but it does mean that the underlying ruleset was messier and less derivable than I’d hoped...sorry :(
- ^
In detail: when your soldiers can’t find a solution using simple rules, they were supposed to list each possible target for their biggest shot, and make separate branches for each of those. However, a bug means that the code execution for the first branch removes shots from their available list for the later branches, and so all the later branches are doomed. Therefore they will win only if the first branch works.
- ^
I have mixed feelings about this scenario.
I was proud of the underlying mechanics, which I think managed to get interesting and at-least-a-little-realistic effects to emerge from some simple underlying rules.
The theme...at least managed to make me giggle to myself a little as I was writing it.
When players submitted answers to this, though, several people got tricked into getting themselves killed. Out of five answers, two players took extremely safe approaches. Of the three players who were more daring, one submitted an excellent answer while two managed to trick themselves into submitting answers that were worse than random.
From a certain point of view, this is a valuable learning experience, which could teach people not to take drastic risks on limited data.
But I feel like other scenarios in this genre may have taught that lesson better without shooting quite so many players in the foot.
Another downside of this strategy is that a political faction not currently perceived by voters as ‘in power’ has an incentive to use any power they do have to actively worsen the lives of voters, who will blame their opposition.
Your boolean disagreement is relevant because it’s actionable. Suppose that:
Alice thinks calling is +$100 EV
Bob thinks calling is +$10 EV
Claire thinks folding is +$10 EV
David thinks folding is +$100 EV
In this case, Bob is much closer to Claire than to Alice in terms of their beliefs. But Bob agrees with Alice about the correct action, which is often the thing where disagreement actually matters.
(Politics-related examples are left as exercises for the reader).
D&D.Sci Thanksgiving: the Festival Feast
I think this is definitely an effect, but I do not think that Bughouse would have been my first example for ‘a game where you need to cooperate with random other people online and can be sabotaged by their inexplicable ineptitude.’
See e.g. this Reddit meme.
This does not sound to me like good advice in general? It could work with a small, driven team on a single focused project who wants to be sure everyone has hands on everything. But in general, specialization is an extremely powerful tool that we use to accomplish things we cannot accomplish alone. I would not benefit from insisting on understanding the whole fertilizer production supply chain before I could eat breakfast.
You seem to be conflating ‘amount of money paid to the worker as salary’ with ‘amount of capital used to equip the worker’.
...I would say that the Soft PNR has clearly already occurred?
They will show you the money if you use the new app Neon Mobile to show the AI companies your phone calls, which shot up to the No. 2 app in Apple’s app store. Only your side is recorded unless both of you are users, and they pay 30 cents per minute, which is $18 per hour. The terms let them sell or use the data for essentially anything.
I feel like this paragraph should at least mention the whole ‘they have already accidentally leaked all your data’ thing.
I have not played Secret Hitler specifically, but in similar games (Mafia and Resistance) it is not in fact the case that members of the majority team should immediately share all information, and some of the best plays I’ve seen have involved members of the majority bluffing the minority.
(With that said, everyone following both of the first two bullets on your list above seems like clearly not a Nash equilibrium).
...but now the winner is a four-and-a-half-way tie. Just take the credit, it’ll be neater. :P
My current accusations of which wizards have been causing[1] disease.
VERY SIMPLE LINKAGES:
Babblepox and Chucklepox are both caused by Danny Nova.
Scraped Knee and Scraped Elbow are both caused by Zancro.
Smokesickness is caused by Nettie Silver.
INTERMEDIATE LINKAGES:
Disease Syndrome is caused by Moon Finder. However, the power of the Moon allows him to strike people with this from a distance: he affects people in sector X+1 or X-1 while he is in sector X.[2]
Parachondria and Problems Disorder are caused by Bartholopew, who says ‘Pew’ while casting spells to strike people with this from a distance: he affects people in sector X+1 or X-1 while he is in sector X.[2]
Scramblepox and Bumblepox are caused by both Azeru (at range up to 1) and Danny Nova (just in his own sector).
Mildly But Persistently Itchy Throat is caused by Dankon Ground. It’s not occuring in his sector, but it only occurs when he is present in the city, never otherwise.
COMPLEX LINKAGES:
Rumblepox is mostly caused by Averill (who leaves behind delayed-action magic that goes off up to 4 days later to spread it), plus a little bit by Danny Nova (just spreading it directly).
Gurglepox is caused by Azeru and Cayn: I believe they may be deceiving the monitoring (since both of them claim to always be in Zone [Day+9 mod 12]) every day they are in the city, even if this means skipping zones). However, it only appears on days when one or the other is in the city. Perhaps they are hiding behind invisibility or illusions while spreading it? EDIT: I am withdrawing this accusation, since it turns out that Azeru and Cayn always have at least one of them in the city. (Also, we already have Azeru nicked on other charges).
Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome was caused by a ritual of some kind cast around Day 390 - it did not appear before then, and since then it has appeared regularly (ha) across all Calderia. I have no proof of who conducted the ritual—I suspect the wizard Gouberi (who formally showed up in the university for the first time the next week), but don’t have enough proof to make that a formal accusation.
I have no idea where The Shivers come from.
- ^
Obviously, no-one would be this offended by people curing disease for free! Rather, it seems clear that the Calderians have some customary circumlocutions around speaking of spreading plague, in order to not bring down the attention of the Pallid Princess, She Who Arises In Filth. We should interpret this whole dataset as about problems caused rather than problems healed, but we shouldn’t say that directly to the Calderians.
- ^
There seems to be some pattern in when these mages affect the clockwise sector and when the counter-clockwise, but I don’t know what it is. It might match e.g. phase of moon, but not neatly enough that I can easily work it out.
Fusion is also a thing. A glass of tap water contains (admittedly a very small amount) of deuterium.
Would you define ‘nuclear weapon’ as ‘anything not produced in a way that verifiably could not contain any nuclear material’?
(Keep in mind that this would categorize e.g. a glass of tap water as a nuclear weapon.)
This is true, but is actually something I looked into making the scenario. The average score of ‘pick a random 20-quality feast from the dataset’ was 15.38, which players did successfully beat.
There was a related writing-constraint that came from me pushing to simplify the ruleset a bit. The original envisioned ruleset was going to give players an additional rule limiting which dishes they were allowed to include.[1]
This would have let me give a substantially larger dataset without worrying that grabbing the best-scoring thing out of the dataset would trivially solve the scenario—if 6-7 dishes were banned, it would be easy for none of the top-scoring feast to be allowed for you, and/or for the best-scoring feast you were allowed to be a single bit of random luck that would betray you if you repeated it.
When I removed that rule, I needed to cut down on the dataset size to avoid that being a trivial solution, which is what led to the data-starvation. Overall I think something like that wouldn’t have been worth the complexity—just telling players they can include whatever dishes they want is simpler and also feels more realistic in context. Open to other views on that, though.
I had a whole bunch of excuses lined up for this too! One of your companions gets seasick and doesn’t want to go hunt Kraken...another is Good-aligned and will be angry if you kill a Pegasus...