[Home]FunwikiContact

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** It would decrease the problem of PokemonClues?, but some people don't seem to see them as a problem.

This page doesn't exist, and probably shouldn't, but it does now because JasonWinerip is a TerriblePerson?. This is a BadIdea come up with around 6 AM because JasonWinerip felt like trolling the BadIdea page as he often does, and felt like playing Contact, like he often does.

FunwikiContact is Contact played using FunWiki as the communication medium, which creates obviously different dynamics.

The first obvious difference is the difficulty of establishing simultaneity for contact revealing. Perhaps editing in and then immediately removing the word you contact with, both as minor edits (I think this prevents it from showing in the diff page, although I could be wrong) would work, so people won't accidentally see it but it can easily checked if the words match (I trust Mudders not to cheat, I'm gonna miss the HonorCode in GradSchool.)

Crypto to the rescue - post [an MD5 digest] of your guess to make contact, then reveal the text you digested asynchronously - the timestamp on your original digest makes it non-repudiable. -- 5afa6e2ed8a813dee43a215f04c48921

So rather than saying contact, you post the the MD5 digest, when there's a challenge, the original clue giver says the correct word, and it can then be hashed to immediately check the contacts? The only problems I see with this are, if more than one person contacts, they'll know if they have the same word. And, if MD5 is case sensitive, there could be issues. Perhaps we should just assume every letter in the word is lower case, even for proper nouns? I don't know. I guess it's easy enough to check things like obviously correct subsets of phrases or differences like plural/singular stuff, and this does seem a little simpler than my suggestion.

even beyond case-sensitivity there are issues like formatting, punctuation, etc that would cause that hash to come out differently. However, hashing can be used thusly: the person posts the hash of their submission, and then when the contact is called, posts the full text. The full text can then be checked against the hash to ensure that it is the same, but we now also have the plaintext to use for comparison with other submissions. This has the downside of being slower, and requiring that people keep an exact copy of their pre-hash text.

I just realized that since (a) the word is an english word and (b) the first 2-3 letters are known, the search space to brute-force the hash is sort of small (order of dozens). I don't think anyone will abuse this, but for the sake of being nerdly, we _could_ use salts. This also solves the problem of knowing whether two people have the same word, and it solves the following problem: I give a clue with two possible answers and hash both, then only respond with the one which I know ClueGuesser? guessed. Of course, it makes it harder - must remember what your salt was, _and_ requires both ClueGuesser? and ClueGiver? to be involved in resolution of a challenge. --RichardBowen

HonorCode, I guess. ContactGames are actually trivial given a good [PrefixIndex], but that doesn't mean people go around looking stuff up in there. --AndrewFarmer

It's not that messy, actually - an example is below. Also, ::: doesn't nest in UseModWiki, bleh. -- AndrewFarmer

example of conflict resolution

important note: ClueGiver? MUST post first upon a challenge, before any Guessers. this is to prevent the ClueGiver? lying and matching the contacters. we can't have the ClueGiver? give a hash as this raises the opportunity for Guessers to check their answers.

I still find it kind of disconcerting that the hashes can be used for some form of checking. Like how it is easy to see if someone else has the same as you, possibly swaying your contact (after all, it does require a majority to actually pass, so y'know...). This could be solved by appending WikiNames to the word before md5ing, but that gets cumbersome. Better ideas?

Another difference is, the formatting of FunWiki makes multiple clues significantly more viable. Contacts and challenges can be inserted after the appropriate clues and with appropriate indentation, so confusion can be avoided. Once any clue is challenged and has successful contact, all other clues can be edited either out or placed before the successful clue to remain unaddressed, and the clue giver move them down if they fit the new letters. can Also, due to the generally slower nature of FunWiki, multiple simultaneous clues may be a good idea. Obviously, edit this with opinions, I may have come up with the idea, but I want help coming up with rules.

So what's the rules on googling things? I'd assumed that it was off-limits, but apparently other people have had completely opposite assumptions. We should get that sorted out before the next game.

This was fun. In fact, this was a triumph! I'm making a note here. Huge success. If anyone wants to start another word, I suggest this page instead of BadIdea for future games, or maybe making a node ContactGames. At any rate, expect me to troll a lot, this is the summer after my graduation and I'm gonna be bored.

Node ContactGames has been created, and has a game to play!


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Last edited August 15, 2010 21:10 (diff)
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