Flyte
Administrator
Posts: 671
6/20/2013
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Botanists for Social Justice: Rigging the Tournament of Lilies
Ladies, gentlemen, and delicious persons who do not conform to simplistic binary conceptions of gender,
Those of you who have had occasion to engage in Botany for any length of time will doubtless have uncovered this Appalling Secret: whether one wins a Contest of Strength or Blood or Beauty is determined almost entirely by whether one is the challenger, and barely at all by how many vicars one's plant has supped on lately.
What should be an honourable contest of luck and skill is, in truth, more a matter of ill-mannered shoving. Which has its place, to be sure. But here -- here, I say it is ungentlemanly.
Well, delicious friends, acquaintances, and persons who occasionally send me heavily armed rodents, I say that we are Londoners. And if Londoners know anything, we know how to queue. Even if, as on this occasion, orderly queuing requires a modicum of Mathematics.
My proposal: by adopting a spirit of scientific collaboration and postlapsarian amity, every one of us can win the Tournament. For this to be possible, we will need at least seven botanists (a propitious number in the Neath, to be sure). I estimate that to achieve this, each of us will need to take around 48 actions with an average profit of one echo or more per action.
Edit: the Tournament has been fixed, or at least changed so that challengers no longer have a significant advantage. So Queuing is no longer feasible, or indeed necessary. As such, I've canceled the second Queue, which fortunately, as it turns out, had not yet begun. The first Queue will, if my proposal meets with general consent, continue in the form of a free-for-all for another month to improve Tyler and Katarina's chances of obtaining Rosettes.
edited by Flyte on 7/24/2013
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Flyte
Administrator
Posts: 671
6/21/2013
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I'm going to use this post to draft a set of rules and explanatory notes on what I shall call the Queue of Lilies. Please feel free to suggest changes and additions -- it's important for it to be something we all agree is sensible and fair. For the same reason, please let me know if anything's hard to understand or makes no sense.
Background: The Tournament of Lilies
1) To enter the Tournament, your Attending to the Needs of a Singular Plant story quality ('Plant quality') must be 10 or more.
2) The Tournament consists of a series of six Contests. In each Contest, two players pit their plants against each other. They are as follows:
- The Contest of Strength;
- The Contest of Cunning;
- The Contest of Blood;
- The Contest of Mysteries;
- The Contest of Voices; and
- The Contest of Beauty.
3) The winner moves on to the next Contest. The loser suffers a small penalty to their Plant quality, and is sent back to the previous Contest (unless of course they are still in the first round, a Contest of Strength). The winner of the Contest of Beauty receives a Cryptobotanical Rosette and a prize worth 11 echoes.
4) You must pay a price to participate in each Contest after the Contest of Strength, and the winner receives a prize. The stakes and prizes are as follows.
- Cunning: 10 Whispered Secrets; 150 Whispered Secrets;
- Blood: 10 Morelways; 1 Extraordinary Implication;
- Mysteries: 1 Extraordinary Implication; 2 Aeolian Screams;
- Voices: 1 Aeolian Scream: 1 Storm-Threnody;
- Beauty: 1 Confident Smile; a Rosette and prize.
5) Unsportingly, the person who challenges another to a Contest almost always wins. This is why the Queue of Lilies exists.
The Queue of Lilies
6) The idea behind the Queue of Lilies is simple. Instead of engaging in undignified jostling and exploiting the naivete of fledgling botanists, we will work together and take it in turns so that we all reach the top. We can do this by exploiting the very rule which makes the Tournament so unsatisfactory as a Competition: the rule that the challenger almost always defeats the person challenged.
7) This can only be done through the collaboration of seven or more botanists.
8) The positions of botanists in the queue will be determined at the outset in accordance with my personal prejudices. Umm, I mean, randomly. If another botanist wishes to generate the list themselves, that's fine: I ask only that:
- You do so using a random number generator; and
- You discard the results until your name is neither first nor second on the list.
I'll adhere to these rules myself. The purpose of the second rule is not so much to prevent unfairness -- we are all gentlemen or the appropriately gendered equivalent, I trust -- as to prevent the appearance of unfairness. Queues, like judges, must be seen to be fair.
9) I could post an optimised sequence of challenges, but that would be tedious for us all and would run into trouble if somehow a challenger lost a Contest. So instead I propose to simply publish an ordered list of names, which we will then act upon in accordance with the next section.
10) Here, 'beneath you', 'most exalted', and other such phrases are short for 'below you on the list', 'highest on the list', and so on, rather than 'your social inferior', 'person of greatest spiritual merit', and other similarly dubious things. I felt this made the algorithm less tiresome (and reduced my urge to attempt a King James Bible pastiche), but if anyone finds the effect more offensive than amusing, let me know publicly or privately and I'll recast it in neutral terms.
- Accept any challenge you receive from someone above you.
- If you receive challenges from more than one person, accept the challenge of the most exalted.
- Never challenge anyone above you, and don't challenge anyone if you are waiting for someone to respond to your challenge. If they're taking ages, contact them or contact me or denounce them (nicely!) in this thread.
- If you are ready for a Contest of Mysteries, Voices or Beauty, and are able to challenge someone more exalted, don't challenge anyone at all. Wait until either they challenge you, or you can no longer challenge them.
- If the above rules aren't applicable, challenge someone beneath you. If there is more than one such person, challenge the most exalted of them.
- If you win the Tournament, congratulations! Post about it here so we can consign you to the depths (of the list).
11) [Reflections on the perfidy of ceasing to participate partway through. Public shaming, stomach upsets, the lamentations of my kitten.]
Advice, Invitations and Explanations
12) If your Plant quality is more than seven and less than 12, it costs two echoes to raise your it by one change point. Since losing a Contest will reduce it by two change points or maybe more, keeping it above ten could get expensive. Fortunately, if it is 12 or higher, it can be increased rather cheaply. It's therefore advisable to enter the queue with a Plant quality of at least 13, and preferably somewhat more.
13) [Rough cost-benefit analysis of participation. Will get round to this in the next few days.]
14) If you aren't interested in a Cryptobotanical Rosette but would be willing to assist those who are in exchange for a brace of Starveling Cats or some other benefit, feel free to post your proposal here.
edited by Flyte on 6/21/2013
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