From: shoham@ll.mit.edu (Daniel Shoham)
Newsgroups: rec.games.diplomacy
Subject: Re: Bringing an aspect of Face-To-Face to the judge
Date: 12 Jan 93 04:02:20 GMT
Organization: MIT Lincoln Laboratory

In article <1993Jan11.163812.26032@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> jfurr@nyx.cs.du.edu (Joel Furr) writes:
>In article <1993Jan11.062752.20379@leland.Stanford.EDU> hufnagel@leland.Stanford.EDU (Todd Hufnagel) writes:
>>David C Kovar writes:
>>>  I did a bit more thinking about this, too. If you sent out a message to
>>>all the players each time a private message was sent, then you'd swamp
>>>people with email. But how about if there was a summary sent along with
>>>your current move status that showed you how many times each of the other
>>>countries had sent email to each of the other countries? The table would
>>>be reset after each move.

IMHO, PBeM dip is *SUPERIOR* to FtF exactly because you never know who is
talking to whom.

I suppose I would never object to yet-another-variant, but I don't think this
should be standard. If someone cares to program it as a variant, let the
"marketplace" decide if it's popular.

Also, players could easily defeat the system by making sure they send all
opponents an equal number of messages. i.e., whenever I send country X a
meaningfull message, I would also send a meaningless message ("Hi England, this
is Turkey. As our planned linkup appear to be delayed yet again, let me take
this oppurtunity to congradulate you upon the recapture of Liverpol.") to
each of the other countries. The net result would be a needless overworking of
the judge bandwidth.

I suspect a MINOR utility of such a variant would be to allow for "no-talk"
agreements. ("Hi Russia, this is Turkey. I will accept the alliance you
proposed provided you promise not to say one word to Austria. Naturally, I
would avoid talking to the Austrian enemies as well"). Such agreement could
be (WITH RISK) circumvented by round-about diplomacy ("Hi Italy, this is 
Russia. Since you and the Austrians seem to be cooperating nicely against my
"ally" Turkey, I figure I can count on you to tell the Austrians that ...").


>>
>>I think this is a great idea; not knowing who's talking to whom makes the
>>e-mail version of Diplomacy quite a bit different than ftf (of course, it's
>>different for other reasons, too).
>
>IMHO, there are feeps we need sooner than this one.  Sure, in FTF
>Diplomacy you see everyone talking to each other, and can, per the rules,
>attempt to eavesdrop, but it adds realism in Judge Diplomacy that you
>don't see who's sending mail to whom.  In the real world, you don't know
>who's sent a secret dispatch to whom.

I always thought the legality of eavesdropping was an out-of-place addition
of physical skills (good hearing, ability to hide oneself) to an otherwise
ellegant mental skills game. I consider it un-play-man-ship-like and ban
eavesdropping in my games. The ability to see who is talking to who in FtF,
I find as a practical LIMITATION (not advantage) of FtF.


>
>As an alternative, I propose an _optional_ feep that you could set as a
>flag on your game.  Players would be able to attempt to intercept other
>players' mail.  Failure would be reported to the players involved in the
>mail.  Success would mean you would get the contents of one message.  Of
>course, this would be useful only in gunboat games.


This is even worst! are you going to introduce randomization devices to the
game? (dies? cards? what's next?) What would be the penalty for failed
eavesdrops (reporting to your enemies that you are trying to listen on them
is hardly a penalty). Why would anyone NOT want to "attempt eavesdrop".
Anyway, this too can be defeated via message fragmentation ("Hi France, this
is England again. Part 32 of 151. On the other hand, if Germany uses his
HOL unit to. -continue in part 33. ") or message coding ("Hi England, this is
France. Use the following table to decode my next message, and my next
message only. Future tables would be provided for future messages ..."). Unless
the Eavesdropper intercepts enough messages the individual ones would be
useless.

If you really want variants that allow eavesdropping and/or other ways to
provide players with information not intended for them (like message counts
proposed above), then there is no escape from "quantizing" the language of
diplomacy. In other word, messages, instead of being in plain english, would
follow some known syntax ("If <legal move> or <legal move> then <war/peace>.
Please <legal move>. etc."). (Games like Bridge an Pinnacles have "quantized"
syntax!)
Defining a sufficient syntax to handle diplomacy is a monumental task (which
may be a needed step toward developing automated diplomacy players, but this
is getting sidetracked) and using it would probably be more of a hassle than
it's worth.


Dan Shoham               shoham@ll.mit.edu
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