That's fair. There are definitely norms I think help overall (or situationally help) that I wish didn't help overall because I don't like them. For example tolerance of late arrivals. I hate it, and also if we didn't tolerate it my most valuable group would never have existed.
This sounds like a strategic misstep, and I'm guessing it was caused either by a hyperalert status manager in your brain or a bad experience at the hands of a bully (intentional or otherwise) in the past.
I estimate that (prepare for uncharitable phrasing) asking anyone with your mindset to try to self-modify to be okay with other people taking steps to make everyone happier in this way is a smaller cost than a norm of "don't bring [cookies], rationalists will turn around and blame everyone who didn't bring them if you dare".
But yeah I think spending points to teach people not to defect against a bring-cookies-if-you-wanna norm (aka thank them, aka don't look askance at the but-I-don't-wanna) is waaay better than spending points to disallow a bring-cookies-if-you-wanna norm.
I agree, and this design avoids that problem, but seems to introduce a much larger one, assuming the intent also includes measuring bots on their ability to survive in progressively more "difficult" bot mixes, which "Darwin" seems to imply.
This choice also nudges me from "has noodled around the idea of hosting a similar competition many times and probably won't" to "same, but slightly more likely to actually do it". :D
Eh, okay, but (prediction) this choice nudges me from "probably participate" to "probably ignore".
If you face a copy of yourself you are automatically awarded the maximum 5 points per round
What's your rationale behind this? Isn't part of the point that you need to be able to survive even in an ecosystem consisting mainly of you?
"Be not too quick to blame those who misunderstand your perfectly clear sentences, spoken or written. Chances are, your words are more ambiguous than you think." -- Illusion of Transparency
Please always dismiss the literal meaning of the words I say (or type) and substitute your personal probability distribution over why I said or typed those words instead.
(upvoted)
(but also)
With the right mindset and equipment and game type, you can add timers and points for staying X amount in-bounds and let the win-firsts include time taken as a first-class citizen in their evaluation of moves. I believe the best outcome I've ever had when doing this was to take two win-firsts (myself and a friend) and reduce our playtime of Mage Knight by a factor of almost 3x. And it was still very fun for both of us! The marginal gain of most of the thinking is small, so adding a small point penalty to "overthinking" is plenty sufficient to pare it down drastically.
My second-favorite teacher in undergrad was relatively unpopular because he taught very difficult classes, at least some of which were required to graduate.