I’m saying it’s unreasonable for hosts to ban calculators full stop. The sentence I disagree with is “some hosts might request that you don’t”
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If a host requested players not use calculators on their setup I would be upset with them
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If such a thing is necessary, I maintain the setup should not have been approved lol.
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also yeah agreed
town of salem role lists moment
I completely agree that if something like the Wolf Detector 6000 existed then it would ruin the game of mafia.
But my perspective hinges on the fact that something like that not only doesn’t exist, but cannot exist without the use of a tool that would be pretty close to, if not beyond, artificial general intelligence.
@May put it very aptly when they said that it’s like reading tea leaves.
And implementing rules to restrict or ban the usage or discussion of analysis tools out of the fear of an ultimately non-existent boogeyman rather than something that has actually ever caused problems feels wrong.
And, as far as your word choice tell goes… I personally don’t think it actually exists.
I do not mean to discredit Makaze, they are the single most prolific developer the FM world has ever seen, their software has fundamentally changed how people play Forum Mafia in numerous ways, as a developer I have a ton of admiration for them and their work, and I could go on fangirling about them, buuuut that word choice variance tool doesn’t pass my sniff test.
When you work with data a lot you get a feel for when things don’t feel right. The methodology they used is closed source and there are a lot of ways for even genuine, careful attempts to discern alignment based on word variance to run afoul. And, my impression is, that tool isn’t even that.
Why would it be? What I think most likely happened is they extracted a very cool dataset and added the naïve implementations of a few different statistical summary metrics on it, then called it a day. And that’s totally valid, statistical rigor isn’t worth the effort unless your goal is statistical rigor. And their goal was not statistical rigor.
Language usage is so second nature to people that there being the kind of huge discrepancy in subtle feature of people’s language usage between their town and wolf game that the tool implies exists… idk, I don’t think I buy it?
And the thing with statistically significant univariate trends over small data sets (such as word choice in FM) - them being visibly apparent is very often a pre-requisite to their statistical significance. Well, unless they’re esoteric metrics that are probably not actually predictive and only meet statistical significance because of intentional or unintentional p-hacking
I think someone’s posting would start to come across as noticeably “stiff” or “stilted” long before you could declare them as mafia because of fancy statistical analysis. And you don’t need statistical analysis to notice stiff or stilted play.
All that said - that second block is really just a belief, I’ve not done any analysis of my own to see if my intuition is right or not here. (Although now I’m feeling low-key inspired to really dig into this after I’m done running Sc2Mafia’s Anni Mash, @Zugzwang hmu if you’re interested in a collab on that).
But either way, I very strongly believe the correct course of action is:
Rather than pre-emptively banning the use or discussion of statistical analysis in games out of fear of what they could do, instead address it if it actually becomes a problem where a player demonstrates the ability to consistently have better than rand reads using statistical analysis.
But I really do not think it’ll ever come to that. Most likely no one bothers even trying. Second most likely, someone tries to read the tea leaves, and realizes that there’s nothing there. Third most likely, they gain misplaced confidence and end up very noticeably wrong enough times that people stop taking their stats posting seriously and it becomes a non-issue.
Someone actually finding the secret sauce requiring a rule to be implemented is the very distant fourth place scenario.
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Yeah im ngl i didnt realize this was even an issue i thought calculators for setups like combinatorics were universally accepted as okay
Wrt banning it im just imagining a host who worked hella hard on a setup for months like “pwease dont crunch numbers 
just play game”
Which i’d have sympathy for 
but yeah tbh can’t rly stop people from using a calculator lol
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well this makes my write up no longer needed SAD
i was gonna go down the list of the programs
well. with that stated, we should state tools blanket-allowed without specific programs?
screen readers, chrome add-ons which alter the look of a site etc
there are programs/tools which should be permitted under like. common sense
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I liked this post but now I’m unliking it. Even non-solvable setups can benefit from calculator programs. Combinatorics is an extreme case in which the game is literally solving a combinatorics problem that’s difficult to do by hand: the program got players information like “Is it optimal to vote to jail 2 players or 3 players on the first day? How many days should we expect to need to win the game? How long will it take the mafia to win the game, should we expect to have time to solve or do we need to go for a Hail Mary?”
Calculators are often relevant even in good setups! Honestly, Zug’s program introduced weird angleshooty stuff: he crunched the numbers beforehand, but only planned to share them publicly if he wasn’t a wolf. I think this is just… like… kind of part of the game, he could’ve shared them as wolf to win towncred, it proved nothing, but saying it’s only an issue in bad setups is silly IMO
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What browser do you use?
firefox. also this does not apply to me whatsoever
i just know there are people that could, technically affect, even if it would probably never be enforced ever, its better to make clear
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Firefox is now banned
Goodbye story
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thank you chloe
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I wasn’t moderated
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May spreading false info
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sects & violets moment
You said you were. Misinformation spreading!!
NOOOOO
Arctic said using ai wasn’t allowed in a misc game which is where the confusuon came from
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You were told you ewren’t uspposed to do it so you stopped. That’s being moderated
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