Weekly Monday Discussion #6 - Computers

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#121

Oh, and one more thing that nobody’s brought up:

There was ambiguity in the Combinatorics game about whether programs that allow you to mathematically prove mechanical stuff in mafia are allowed. Zug was working on a program that would look for the optimal series of jails to solve Combinatorics, for example.

I think these should just obviously be allowed??? It’s just doing math on setups, it usually happens pre-game, it’s not alignment-indicative, it doesn’t “break the spirit of the game”, it’s completely impossible to ban because “having solved a setup” isn’t an activity that happens on FoL, plenty of established setups have had this math done on them in similar ways. But others were saying they weren’t, because they fell under the “AI programs” rule, and apparently Litten was previously moderated for using such a program in a misc.

The legality of such Mathdoings should probably be explicitly noted somewhere.

4 Likes
#122

My idea is kinda a “banned unless you get approval” type of policy for tools

If someone mentions the use of a program that hasn’t gotten a thumbs up from the mod team, that would be against the rules

3 Likes
#123

I mean you dont need a program to do math? I remember someone else literally showed the paper math for it as well. If its actually math i think using a program is fine (and thsts a great case for it) and i also dont see how thatd fit under outside info or ai use etc etc

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#124

Is using the genie akinator to figure out the alignment of people in my games approved

1 Like
#125

Wait isn’t half the point combinatorics literally to figure out the optimal elims using math :joy_cat:

That seems fine to me?

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#126

I do not think it’s always trivial to change i.e. my word choice alignment differential is likely due to 1) how much I am thinking about the game as a villager vs a wolf 2) the different things I’m trying to accomplish as either alignment. I just cannot change the first one. If I didn’t want to get caught again, I would need to use more words as a wolf that both would not be detectable by the program, but also not detectable by players in the game (i.e. if someone can tell I’m contorting my posts to avoid detection by the bot, that may also be outing). The “add noise to foil automated outing via data analysis” minigame doesn’t seem fun to me.

#127

Combinatorics mafia gets super complicated math-wise

1 Like
#128

mod-hat-off, imo there’s nothing wrong with using, like, a normal calculator that does basic math in a mafia game, and it doesn’t really matter if instead of “normal calculator that does basic math” you do the same thing with an Excel spreadsheet or a computer program

5 Likes
#129

I thought it was perfectly fine but apparently Arctic did not :joycat:

#130

As someone who is beating the “ban automatedlarge dataset analysis” drum, I think mechanical analysis is more fine because it’s, like, limited to the context of a current game, and already divorced from social deduction elements that invite a soft/hard solves like that.

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#131

Math StackExchange removed the question that Zug and I wrote about the game because it didn’t have enough context :’(

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#132

Imo that decision is proooobably one best left for the host rather than a blanket rule
tbh i could get it if some hosts dont want that talked about publicly

#133

I don’t think that works at all, given you can do math on an open setup before the game starts. What if I just so happen to post that analysis in the cookie thread pregame? What if I see the game in the queue and run the math on it before the host can even tell me not to? What if I run the math completely offsite and other players in the game see it? That’s not within the host’s purview. That’s not within the bounds of the game. You can’t reasonably ban the discussion of such programs, at least for open setup, because you can’t control what players do outside the game thread

1 Like
#134

yeah I mean for individual games almost all forum game rules (as opposed to global rules) can be waived at host discretion with reviewer approval, and likewise they can add extra rules for their game

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#135

But yeah by default i’d say crunching the numbers on a setup is fine unless a host is like “pls dont”

#136

And it would be OMEGA AWKWARD to have people, like, running programs pre-game that they’re talking about that they then can’t talk about in the game

#137

with that being said trying to restrict things in the genre of calculators seems very silly

4 Likes
#138

And even if you do consider it plausible to ban using programs to crunch the numbers on a setup, say the setup is unique and invented for the game and the host is able to ban people from using their fancy calculators to crunch that specific setup both pre-game and in-game… what if somebody just says they did it manually? It feels stupid and fruitless to try to ban people from automating mathematics.

1 Like
#139

If a setup is hard solvable by number crunching pre-rand, it probably should not have been approved. I agree with May that at that point, you can’t really stop people from said number crunching and silly to try to stop it.

6 Likes
#140

May i think we agree lol
I may have worded something poorly somewhere
I’m just saying i think calculators are fine to use but some hosts might request that you don’t

3 Likes