Re: Challenge: Find potential use cases for non-trivial confinement

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Wed, 3 May 2006 12:07:33 +0200,
Pierre THIERRY <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Scribit address@hidden dies 03/05/2006 hora 01:06:
> > The hall of fame can be provided as a service, by the entity who
> > installed the game. (Probably the admin, or just some normal user.)
> 
> But this fails to address the guarantee that only through the game you
> will access the service.
> 
> In your scheme, I'll just have to contact the service and ask for a
> record above all others. That's precisely because of this that I
> envisioned the idea of a checking score daemon:
> 
> http://arcanes.fr.eu.org/~pierre/2005/07/score%20daemon/
> 
> You see, I've thought very hard on the problem of game scoring.

The word game is ambiguous.  However, I assume we are talking about
games that are played for fun.

In this case, I think it is important to the character of the game
that cheating is possible, at least in principle.  If cheating is
forbidden, it's not a game anymore (for me), but a competition.

The difference is if your goal is playing the game, or if it is
getting a certain high score.  Or, to take an example from the real
world: The difference is between eating a hot dog because you are
hungry, or participating in Nathan's Famous Fourth of July
International Hot Dog-Eating Contest (btw, the record is 53 1/2 in
twelve minutes).

One last note: If cheating is possible for everybody equally, it
doesn't make sense anymore to cheat.  This is a peculiar paradox.  It
is closely related to the prisoner dilemma.  The best description
about this strange effect that I know in print is Douglas
R. Hofstaedter, Metamagical Themes (chapter 29 in my German edition).

Thanks,
Marcus