Nomic

Last updated

Nomic is a game created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber, the rules of which include mechanisms for changing those rules, usually beginning by way of democratic voting. [1] The game demonstrates that in any system where rule changes are possible, a situation may arise in which the resulting laws are contradictory or insufficient to determine what is in fact legal.

Contents

Its name derives from the Greek for "law", νόμος (nomos), because it models (and exposes conceptual questions about) legal systems and the problems of legal interpretation.

Gameplay

All aspects of Nomic are variable; the players can vote to change the rules to whatever sort of game they want to play. The initial ruleset was designed by Peter Suber, and was first published in Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" column in the June 1982 edition of Scientific American . [2] Hofstadter discussed Suber's book The Paradox of Self-Amendment, in which Suber defined the game thus:

Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.

— Peter Suber, The Paradox of Self-Amendment [3]

Initially, gameplay occurs in clockwise order, with each player taking a turn. In that turn, they propose a change in rules that all the other players vote on, and then roll a die to determine the number of points they add to their score. If this rule change is passed, it comes into effect at the end of their round. Any rule can be changed with varying degrees of difficulty, including the core rules of the game itself. As such, the gameplay may quickly change. The game can be played face-to-face with as many written notes as are required, or through any of a number of Internet media (usually an archived mailing list or Internet forum).

Under Suber's initial ruleset, rules are either mutable or immutable . Immutable rules take precedence over mutable ones, and must be changed into mutable rules (called transmuting ) before they can be modified or removed.

A rule change may be:

While the victory condition in Suber's initial ruleset is the accumulation of 100 points by the roll of dice, he once said that "this rule is deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to please themselves". [1] Any rule in the game, including the rules specifying the criteria for winning and even the rule that rules must be obeyed, can be changed.

Online

Nomic is particularly suited to being played online, where all proposals and rules can be shared in web pages or email archives for ease of reference. Such games can last for a very long time: Agora has been running since 1993. [4] The longevity of nomic games can pose a serious problem, in that the rulesets can grow so complex that some participants do not fully understand them, and prospective players are deterred from joining. One currently active game, BlogNomic, [5] gets around this problem by dividing the game into "dynasties"; every time someone wins, a new dynasty begins, and all the rules except a privileged few are repealed. This keeps the game relatively simple and accessible. Nomicron (now defunct) was similar in that it had rounds – when a player won a round, a convention was started to plan for the next round. A game of Nomic on reddit, nommit (now defunct), [6] used a similar mechanism modeled on Nomicron's system.

Another facet of Nomic is the way in which the implementation of the rules affects the way the game of Nomic itself works. ThermodyNomic, for example, had a ruleset in which rule changes were carefully considered before implementation, and rules were rarely introduced which provide loopholes for the players to exploit. B Nomic, [7] by contrast, was once described by one of its players as "the equivalent of throwing logical hand grenades". [8]

Variants

Many variants of Nomic exist, all based on the initial ruleset. Some that have themes, begin with a single rule, or begin with a dictator instead of a democratic process to validate rules. Others combine Nomic with an existing game—such as Monopoly or chess, [9] or, in one humorously paradoxical attempt, the improvisational game Mornington Crescent. [10] Even more unusual variants include a ruleset in which the rules are hidden from players' view, and a game which, instead of allowing voting on rules, splits into two sub-games, one with the rule, and one without it.

In a computerized Nomic, the rules are interpreted by a computer, rather than by humans. This implies that the rules should be written in a language that a computer can understand, typically some sort of programming language or Game Description Language. Nomyx is such an implementation. [11] [12]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas Hofstadter</span> American professor of cognitive science (born 1945)

Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, strange loops, artificial intelligence, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research- and application-based professional activity or as a part of a student's formal education. Although it is not necessarily limited to being an endeavor for amateurs, many topics in this field require no knowledge of advanced mathematics. Recreational mathematics involves mathematical puzzles and games, often appealing to children and untrained adults and inspiring their further study of the subject.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-reference</span> Sentence, idea or formula that refers to itself

Self-reference is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and other fields.

<i>The Evolution of Cooperation</i> 1984 book by Robert Axelrod

The Evolution of Cooperation is a 1984 book written by political scientist Robert Axelrod that expands upon a paper of the same name written by Axelrod and evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton. The article's summary addresses the issue in terms of "cooperation in organisms, whether bacteria or primates".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mornington Crescent (game)</span> Improvisational comedy game

Mornington Crescent is an improvisational comedy game featured in the BBC Radio 4 comedy panel show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (ISIHAC), a series that satirises panel games.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mao (card game)</span> Card game

Mao is a card game of the shedding family. The aim is to get rid of all of the cards in hand without breaking certain unspoken rules which tend to vary by venue. The game is from a subset of the Stops family and is similar in structure to the card game Uno or Crazy Eights.

<i>Metamagical Themas</i> 1985 book by Douglas Hofstadter

Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles that Douglas Hofstadter wrote for the popular science magazine Scientific American during the early 1980s. The anthology was published in 1985 by Basic Books.

In object-oriented (OO) and functional programming, an immutable object is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created. This is in contrast to a mutable object, which can be modified after it is created. In some cases, an object is considered immutable even if some internally used attributes change, but the object's state appears unchanging from an external point of view. For example, an object that uses memoization to cache the results of expensive computations could still be considered an immutable object.

In economics and game theory, a participant is considered to have superrationality if they have perfect rationality but assume that all other players are superrational too and that a superrational individual will always come up with the same strategy as any other superrational thinker when facing the same problem. Applying this definition, a superrational player playing against a superrational opponent in a prisoner's dilemma will cooperate while a rationally self-interested player would defect.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Liskov substitution principle</span> Object-oriented programming principle

The Liskov substitution principle (LSP) is a particular definition of a subtyping relation, called strong behavioral subtyping, that was initially introduced by Barbara Liskov in a 1987 conference keynote address titled Data abstraction and hierarchy. It is based on the concept of "substitutability" – a principle in object-oriented programming stating that an object may be replaced by a sub-object without breaking the program. It is a semantic rather than merely syntactic relation, because it intends to guarantee semantic interoperability of types in a hierarchy, object types in particular. Barbara Liskov and Jeannette Wing described the principle succinctly in a 1994 paper as follows:

Subtype Requirement: Let be a property provable about objects of type T. Then should be true for objects of type S where S is a subtype of T.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1000 Blank White Cards</span> Party game

1000 Blank White Cards is a party game played with cards in which the deck is created as part of the game. Though it has been played by adults in organized groups worldwide, 1000 Blank White Cards is also described as well-suited for children in Hoyle's Rules of Games. Since any game rules are contained on the cards, 1000 Blank White Cards can be considered a sort of nomic. It can be played by any number of players and provides the opportunity for card creation and gameplay outside the scope of a single sitting. Creating new cards during the game, dealing with previous cards' effects, is allowed, and rule modification is encouraged as an integral part of gameplay.

In the platonia dilemma introduced in Douglas Hofstadter's book Metamagical Themas, an eccentric trillionaire gathers 20 people together, and tells them that if one and only one of them sends them a telegram by noon the next day, that person will receive a billion dollars. If they receive more than one telegram, or none at all, no one will get any money, and cooperation between players is forbidden. In this situation, the superrational thing to do is to send a telegram with probability 1/20.

The Laws of the Game are the codified rules of association football. The laws mention the number of players a team should have, the game length, the size of the field and ball, the type and nature of fouls that referees may penalise, the offside law, and many other laws that define the sport. During a match, it is the task of the referee to interpret and enforce the Laws of the Game.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-referential humor</span> Humor that alludes to itself

Self-referential humor, also known as self-reflexive humor, self-aware humor, or meta humor, is a type of comedic expression that—either directed toward some other subject, or openly directed toward itself—is self-referential in some way, intentionally alluding to the very person who is expressing the humor in a comedic fashion, or to some specific aspect of that same comedic expression. Here, meta is used to describe that the joke explicitly talks about other jokes, a usage similar to the words metadata, metatheatrics and metafiction. Self-referential humor expressed discreetly and surrealistically is a form of bathos. In general, self-referential humor often uses hypocrisy, oxymoron, or paradox to create a contradictory or otherwise absurd situation that is humorous to the audience.

Meta is an adjective meaning "more comprehensive" or "transcending".

In some programming languages, const is a type qualifier, which indicates that the data is read-only. While this can be used to declare constants, const in the C family of languages differs from similar constructs in other languages in that it is part of the type, and thus has complicated behavior when combined with pointers, references, composite data types, and type-checking. In other languages, the data is not in a single memory location, but copied at compile time for each use. Languages which use it include C, C++, D, JavaScript, Julia, and Rust.

Standards in the warez scene are defined by groups of people who have been involved in its activities for several years and have established connections to large groups. These people form a committee, which creates drafts for approval of the large groups. Outside the warez scene, often referred to as p2p, there are no global rules similar to the scene, although some groups and individuals could have their own internal guidelines they follow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Suber</span> American philosopher advocate of open access

Peter Dain Suber is an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP). Suber is known as a leading voice in the open access movement, and as the creator of the game Nomic.

In computer programming, a constant is a value that is not altered by the program during normal execution. When associated with an identifier, a constant is said to be "named," although the terms "constant" and "named constant" are often used interchangeably. This is contrasted with a variable, which is an identifier with a value that can be changed during normal execution. To simplify, constants' values remains, while the values of variables varies, both hence their names.

<i>Cities in Motion 2</i> 2013 video game

Cities in Motion 2 is a 2013 business simulation game that was developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive and is the sequel to the popular mass transit simulation game Cities in Motion. As with its predecessor, the goal of the game is to create efficient public transport systems in different major cities of the world. In this edition, there are several new features that the developers introduced based on community feedback about the previous game, including day/night cycles, rush hours and the ability to create timetables. The additions also include dynamic cities where players' decisions have a notable impact on city growth, and the inclusion of cooperative and competitive multi-player. The developer of Cities in Motion 2, Colossal Order, also developed Cities: Skylines, which is also a city building game with a mass transit system.

References

  1. 1 2 Suber, Peter (2003). "Nomic: A Game of Self-Amendment". Earlham College. Archived from the original on 2020-03-03. Retrieved 2023-12-15.
  2. ↑ Hofstadter, Douglas (1996). Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. Basic Books. pp. 70–83. ISBN   978-0-465-04566-2.
  3. ↑ Suber, Peter (1990). The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Law, Logic, Omnipotence, and Change. Peter Lang Publishing. p. 362. ISBN   0-8204-1212-0.
  4. ↑ "Agora official website". Archived from the original on 2011-06-23. Retrieved 2011-04-10.
  5. ↑ "BlogNomic website". Archived from the original on 2014-12-02. Retrieved 2005-10-12.
  6. ↑ "nommit on Reddit". Archived from the original on 2017-10-22. Retrieved 2017-09-06.
  7. ↑ "B Nomic". Archived from the original on 2008-12-03. Retrieved 2022-03-15.
  8. ↑ Comment on spoon-discuss, a discussion list for B Nomic. SkArcher (17 Jan 2004). "Re: [spoon-discuss] so do we have a game or not?". Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 7 May 2014.
  9. ↑ David Howe. "Nomic Chess". Chessvariants.com. Archived from the original on 2009-09-30. Retrieved 2009-10-31.
  10. ↑ "Mornington Nomic". Dunx.org. Archived from the original on 2020-05-31. Retrieved 2009-10-31.
  11. ↑ "Nomyx, the game where you can change the rules". www.nomyx.net. Archived from the original on 2020-11-12. Retrieved 2021-11-13.
  12. ↑ "Nomyx". GitHub . 17 October 2021. Archived from the original on 16 February 2016. Retrieved 1 July 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.