One Hour One Life Forums

Yes, a duke could keep overriding the king's redemption.  I suppose that at that point, the king would exile the duke.  Of course, the duke can exile someone repeatedly in secret, and then folks would have to ferret out what's going on.

We'll see how it shakes out.  I'm guessing that people who have a lot of followers won't do too much messing around.  They have followers for a reason.  And other people will do a LOT of messing around, but it doesn't matter, because they have no followers.  They can pretend to exile people and do whatever hi-jinx, but it doesn't need to be thrown in anyone's face.  You don't need to be notified when it happens, right?

And especially since you can't control who follows you, you really don't want to be bothered with the goings-on of those beneath you.  Let them sort it out, mostly, unless a case bubbles up that needs your attention.  So you don't really care who your followers are banning.  Your followers could be anyone, right?  Some rogue duke comes and follows you, and now you need to get notifications about who he's exiling?

In general, the problem is that there's a lot of information and no room to show it.

For example, it might already say:

YOUR EXILED LORD MATTHEW SMITH - YOUR UNCLE

If we need to put the exiler in there too?  Yikes.

YOUR EXILED LORD MATTHEW SMITH - YOUR UNCLE - EXILED BY KING JOHN SMITH

And don't forget that people can be exiled by more than one person.  Your whole chain of command (above you) might agree.  Or an entire tier beneath you (all the dukes) might agree too.  We can't display that information on mouse-over.

The power of a hierarchy comes from the logarithmic scaling.  You only need to worry about what's going on in your little section of the tree.

Currently, as I have implemented it, you must be wearing chest clothing for your badge or exile status to be visible.

Hard to pin a badge to bear skin.

And the X could be on bare skin, but then it's like a tattoo or something?  Maybe I will add this if it becomes a big enough problem.  Yeah... I guess I really need to do this now.  So the X on an exiled person shows always, even if they are naked.... okay, hmm...

I was thinking that it could just be the case that nakeds can't be trusted so much, and griefers would run around naked to avoid detection, which would be cool.

But I also want to give this system the best chance of actually working and being valuable to people, so.

And yes, you all are correct:  following the king directly won't make you a Duke if you have no followers yourself.

And I did implement DUBIOUS status (where someone is still following a leader who has been exiled by someone you trust.... they know their leader is exiled, but they haven't jumped ship).

And I did implement downwards redemption, where a higher leader can undo the exiles of a lower leader.  If your higher leader keeps messing you up by doing this, then you can stop following him, right?

But there is currently no notification when you are exiled by someone.  If they are your leader, you will see yourself as exiled (or dubious, if your leader is exiled).  But if they are not your leader, you won't know.  This is fine, I think, because the exile operation is so cheap to perform.  Any idiot can exile you at any time, and you won't really care.  No reason to bother you with that information.  And if you're exiled by the King, you'll figure that out soon enough.

That is why it's so important that higher leaders can redeem you.  If someone in your chain of command exiles you, you won't know who did it.  But if you go to the top and make your case, you can be redeemed.

The other way is to go follow each leader up the chain of command in turn.  Once you get "over the head" of the guy who exiled you, you will stop seeing yourself as exiled.

No one is banned from doing anything when exiled.  They keep whatever leaders, and can change leaders whenever.

They do see themselves as exiled, assuming that they still follow the chain of command that exiled them.  If they switch leaders, they no longer see themselves as exiled.  This makes sense.  While you have a leader, you trust their judgement, including their judgement about you.  Like IRL, where you abide by laws, and submit to police when you yourself break the law.

If their leader is exiled, they see themselves as dubious.

Only 2 is true.

Everyone currently sees all badges and titles for all trees.  So you can know who the other guy's King is, because he is decorated.  You don't see him as YOUR KING JAMES, just KING JAMES, and his badge is a different color from yours, but you still see his chevrons.  You can also see all of King Jame's followers without following him.

The main info you gain by joining is the shared exile list that the king is maintaining, but that doesn't seem like a big secret.

As for (2), yes, this is true, but that will just mean that people will treat allies with some hesitation.  Anyone can be a low-level ally, right?

If someone is constantly switching sides, the solution is simple:  just exile them from your side.  Then you will always see them with a black X yourself, and if they ever join your side again, all your followers will see the X too.

"I'd better keep out of Kingdom Y, because I'm currently exiled there!"

I just checked the code, and it doesn't let you follow or exile yourself.

The two-way contract is interesting, but much more inconvenient and harder to manage and maintain.

Something interesting that I've been thinking about.  In general, even in real life, you can't force someone to follow you, but you also can't prevent them from following you.  If they want to treat you as your leader, you can't stop them.  I mean, unless you issue them a command to stop following you.  "I'm not your leader.  That's a direct order!"  But it's a self-defeating order, right?

I'm reminded of that scene at the end of Sword in the Stone where they all decide Arthur is king, and he's like WTF, I don't want to be king!  But they all hail him anyway, and they stick him in the castle, and he's basically trapped.

This is why it's kinda foolish to view the leaders as the powerful ones.  The masses are the powerful ones.  The leader is their slave in a very real way.

Anyway, regarding switching sides, etc...  I think that's okay, because a loner switching sides doesn't change the info that much.  Just one guy with a different color badge.  Sub-leaders switching sides, is a bigger deal, but that will happen less often, because a group of people has trusted them  If they do it too much, their followers will leave them.  Our leader is clearly fickle, let's pick a different leader.

This already happens in real life, because you don't just hand valuable resources to some private in the army.  You might not even let him in.  The fact that he has no chevrons means he's something of an uncertain factor.  But if I guy comes up with your color and a lot of chevrons, you'll trust him a bit more.

Of course, he could be a rogue baron who has just switched sides to trick you... I guess that's the real case we're worried about.  But as we go further up the tree, those problems become less frequent and easier to settle.  There aren't that many barons, so they don't switch sides that much, and when they do, and we're not sure about it, we go talk to the Count.  If the Count says they know nothing about that baron, and that the baron is a spy, the count can exile the Baron, and the problem is solved.

There is a question about people UNDER an exiled Baron, and what happens there.  They aren't (currently) seen as exiled themselves.  They did nothing wrong.... I think I may need to fix that.  They should be highly motivated to stop following the exiled Baron, right?  Not just slink along under him and trick people into seeing them as allies.  Maybe they could get "half an X", or a black \ over their badge...

This update has gotten me thinking about the nature of power, and the consolidation of power.  Clearly, every society in history has witnessed the consolidation of power in some form.  They may dress it up in bloodline monarchies, ruthless military dictators, communist parties, or the popular vote, but the end result is always the same.  The question is:  why?  Why does this keep happening?  Is it because people lust for power?  Is it human nature?

We could also ask why every society values and protects women more then men, and sends men off to do the dangerous jobs (war, hunting, exploration, construction).  Why do women get on the lifeboats first?  The answer there lies in a simple fact of biological reality.  If there was a society that didn't value and protect women, it's not around anymore, just like if there was a race of one-legged people, they're not around anymore.  We have what we have because it's what works.  Reality is filled with things that actually work.

I'm now convinced that the consolidation of power stems from a similar fact of reality.

When I told my 11-y-o about this new system today, he said, "It will never work, because everyone will want to be king, and no one will follow anyone.  No one wants to be a follower."

In real life, though, we have one President.  What makes him president, and not me, or not my wife?  What if I said, "No, I'm president!"  What's the difference between the real President and me?  You could say "the vote," but the vote happened 3 years ago.  Today, I say I'm President, and the vote is nullified.  Why am I not actually President?  Because 300M + people agree that the other guy is President, and 0 people agree that I'm president.  My statement is meaningless without other people to back me up.  And if I somehow got 300M people behind me, and they all said I was President today, the vote from three years ago would be irrelevant.

But starting from scratch, how do we get to that point?  Everyone wants to be president, and no one's willing to follow anyone else.  To paraphrase The Incredibles, "If everyone's President, then no one is."

So let's say we start with this kind of stand-off.  10 people all want to be king, and no one has any followers.  Aren't they forever deadlocked?  The system is broken, they can't share information about exilees (they each have their own personal exile lists, but they can't see other people's exiles, because they have no trust structure).  Does life just go on like this forever?

Imagine two people who defect from the status quo.  They get together and say, "Look, this isn't working, we can't share information, etc.  Screw it, I follow you, you're my Lord"  Suddenly, those two people have an advantage over the others.  They can easily recognize each other (via badges), and they can share the leader's exile list.  As additional people join them, their advantage grows, through network effects and logarithmic properties of the tree they're building.  Three people sharing the same exile list is more efficient than two, and a chain of communication and organization can also form.

A dozen people yelling at one leader for attention, to maintain the global exile list, is inefficient.  Much better to delegate.  Have four Lords with one or two followers each, two Barons above the Lords, and one Count.  This also makes the tree more robust against corruption and easier to change and repair as needed.  A flat tree with one leader makes it VERY painful to change leaders.  You have to get all 12 people to agree on the new leader together.  But if a nicely structured tree needs to change the top leader, you just need to get a few people to agree.  If you have a corrupt Count, you just need to get the two Barons to pick a new Count.  Much easier to get 2 people to move together than 12.

As this little knot of organized people grows, it's advantages over the disorganized population grows.  It becomes more efficient, more robust, more resilient in the face of corruption, and so on.  Joining it, even for the most stubborn hold-out, becomes an obvious win.

So we can talk about a lust for power, or the inherent desire of some people to order other people around.  But reality disagrees.  Each person, acting alone, has roughly the same amount of power (the power of a single person).  I can try to order other people around, but they have as much power to resist me as I have power to control them.  I say, "Get over here," and they say, "No."  And there we stand.  And good luck trying to control multiple people as one person, acting alone.

The only way to achieve more power than one person is through a group of people, acting in concert.  And a group of people, acting together, always happens through some sort of consensus.  We can at least say that they allow themselves to be led by one person through consensus, always.  Yes, membership in the group itself quickly becomes non-consensual (because the collected power of the group can easily squash the individual power of one defector who wants to leave the group).  But it is always the group that is powerful, and not the individual leader.  When the group changes their collective mind, the leader is gone (and usually dead) by lunchtime.

And that fact of reality has shaped every society throughout history.  Groups of people, acting together, are incredibly powerful.  The more people you have acting together, the more powerful they become.

You can try to ignore this fact of reality, and go your own way, and "do what you want," and ignore what you're told to do, but reality has different ideas, and at some point you're going to have 300M boots marching toward your door...

It's a scary thought, certainly.

It also seems to me that this reality has also been the eventual undoing of every society.  A group of people can become twisted and irrational and self-destructive over time, yet still so powerful that nothing can stop it... not even the group itself.

But I do think that looking toward the leaders as the power-hungry sources of the problem is a mistake.  Whenever we have cut off one head, historically, another one has quickly sprouted in its place, and for very good reasons.

If you bribe only one Duke into following you, only that Duke will get your exile list when you die.  Yes, it could be a mass exile list, but everyone below the Duke will be like WTF, dude, this is nuts, we're all exiled.  All they have to do is stop following the Duke to undo the treachery that he committed by following you, the bad king.  The Counts pick a new Duke, and the whole thing is fixed.

The interesting thing here is the tree, which allows giant repairs like this via a logarithmic number of actions.  There might be dozens of people who are now exiled due to the actions of this bad Duke, and it can all be fixed when two counts change Dukes.

To clarify:  The exile stuff is dynamic too, and recomputed constantly.  When your Duke exiled someone, it isn't passed down to you.  It's just on his list.  When you see someone, their exile status is determined dynamically, based on who you follow.  When you change leaders, that computation will change, and you'll instantly forget the old exilees and see different exilees.  In other words, the Duke's exile list doesn't "stick" to you, as his follower.  So a leader can't do any kind of permanent "damage" to the tree by exiling the wrong people.  The tree can be repaired in a flash by ousting that leader.

Yes, this is already supported.

Before King dies, they pick someone to inherit their position, and say, "I FOLLOW YOU"

Before the death of the King, that person becomes an Emperor.  But they are really just a temporary Emperor.  Let's call them a Temperor.

Upon the King's death, that young Emperor becomes the new King, and the Emperor role evaporates.

I did it this way to support the necessary function (inheritance of structure) without adding a new verb or a new system.

Note that throughout this system, titles are dynamic.  They are computed in realtime, constantly, by how many tiers of living people are beneath you.  You are only a Lord so long as you have followers.  You are only a Baron so long as at least one Lord is following you, and no other Barons are following you.  As soon as one Baron follows you, you become a Count.  But when that Baron dies, you go back to being a lowly Baron again (you inherit that Baron's Lords as followers).

Yes, post updated to reflect this.  Exile lists float down, not up, on death of a leader.

Yes, you're right about that exploit.  That's a good idea as a fix.  So if you have no followers, and you die, nothing happens.  Your leader inherits no followers, and your followers inherit no exile list, because you have no followers.  This also fixes another problem:  If a King who has exiled people judiciously (a valuable exile list, important info) dies with no leader, then the kingdom is divided (naturally), but the exile list is lost.  Passing the exile list to the King's immediate followers fixes that problem.  The exile list will be preserved whenever it can be.  Fixing the original post to clarify this.

Now, if a King with lots of followers does the same trick (exiling a bunch of people and then suiciding), it will still leave a mess behind, but at least they are sacrificing a privileged and valuable position to pull off this trick.

I'd need to buy a new Mac to make that build, and spend several days getting it set up (new macs use a new compiler, not gcc, etc.)  There's also the SDL 1.2 library problem, which is 32-bit.  Switching over to a different SDL would require several weeks of work, and likely introduce many bugs.

Apple keeps breaking backwards compatibility.  They've been doing in my whole life.  I get why they do it, but it doesn't make it easy to develop for their platform.

Sadly, with the 4% of customers who use Mac (and the 96% who do not), I really can't justify the time it takes to keep chasing Apple.

Please email me for a refund:  jasonrohrer AT fastmail DOT fm

Yes!

Yes, still there at good old (0,0)

Yeah, there could be an "center line" of some kind.

But currently, you kinda know that if you walk E or W, you're more likely to find civs than N or S.