by Sirius Kase on Thu Apr 18, 2019 9:44 pm
Caught up, finally, I let someone borrow me for a couple of hours and it turned into half a day and half a night.
Last time I was caught up, we had just suffered loss of Mets due to untreated poisoning, Aage for reasons unknown, and a new poisoning of Buj, who Aage had just confirmed as town. Any remnant of a sleeper cell theory was gone. Scum was awake, but by then, I realized they probably weren't ever asleep, but investigating, they probably can't kill and investigate at the same time, and it makes more sense for them to quietly identify their victims.
Prior to helping my friend out, I spent some time studying the game. I realized that there wasn't much interest in the mechanical questions I was asking, so I went to google. Although I took an elective course in game theory in grad school, mafia wasn't discussed. So, I googled for academic papers, just to see if there were any. I learned a little, not much. They study vanilla games which are pure probability, only strategy that makes sense is to lynch randomly by day and kill randomly at night. Anything more complicated turns into psychology of "mass hysteria", not real science. Not our game either, I don't think.
First useful fact, for a balanced game, the ideal number of scum is the square root of the number of players. So, for 16, that would be 4. But, that assumes no power roles at all. Every time you give town a power role, it unbalances into town's favor so game designer needs to give similar powered roles to scum. So, now, it makes sense to have multiple poisoners, multiple doctors, and several players with investigative abilities. Scum probably has doc and investigator, not just killers, and town was probably given a few shady characters, too. Also, third parties and extra mafia is possible. I think Raz put a high priority on keeping this game interesting for all, even if it means some of us have to do a little outside reading. If this isn't of interest to you, it's not meant for you, but I don't think I'm the only one who needs this. BTW, I haven't invoked the n-card in several weeks, any mention of it has been by people putting me down. That's not everyone.
Okay, the chapcrap methodology. First, I don't like anything that puts me on someone's scum list. My plan, has been to wait until I was pressured to claim. There is a balance between making myself vulnerable and making myself useful. I'm the town enabler, I enable anyone with investigative abilities to use them. I expect that would make me a target for scum, especially since we haven't had any investigative claiming until recently. When Pershy was lynched, I was afraid you would have no use for me and you would let scum kill me. No one has claimed cop, but chapcrap has a way to investigate and someone else investigates with his tentacles. Pika does something. Also, I've seen that if scum poisons me, I'll probably get healed.
Back to his methodology which can be generalized to the others. The brute force algorithm would be to take subgroups from the entire population until you identified a group that was 100% town, then swap other people in and out. But, that would take many nights, so we need to use a little more intelligence in choosing who to investigate each night. We need to coordinate so that the most dangerous killers are found first. We have Pika, chapcrap, and the creepy guy with tentacles. They can check out everyone in just two nights.
Separately, we can test our healers. Pick someone of marginal value, if they are poisoned, ask just one doctor to heal. If they die, then we know something about the doctor. We don't want a situation where one doctor says he didn't heal because he thought the other one would. But, we don't want both of them targeting the same victim, either. We need clearcut instructions for the healers, and a plan for the investigators. The trick will be doing it knowing that scum is right there with us.
I'll reread. I'm not skimming, but it's much to absorb. We need to fill in the gaps in the database, so you have me now. I have plans for this weekend, and wanted to get this out before I got any votes for not contributing.
fp Zabeast and craptrap who appears to have voted for me, thanks, I appreciate that. Now I'll go read your explanation.
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