Notices

Good questions.

The players are equal shareholders (at least at the beginning) in a large cooperative that has one goal in 3 parts (as you correctly identified): mine the resource, refine it, and sell it. No CEO as I envision it, but you could say there's an "invisible hand" at play.

As for turns... good question. I see a turn as one mine/refine/sell cycle. But I'll admit I have not put as much thought into that.

Consider this though: say the market is moving in "real time" (condensed of course for the game). So if your processor is down, you can only sell refined inventory on hand. And just like in the real world, there would be natural consequences/costs for accumulation of inventory, so Just In Time processing is the key to success. So if you "miss a turn", you run the risk of irritating your customer, who in turn may devalue your product.

And just a thought: there could be hidden competitors, too, which adds another wrinkle dynamic. But that's another thought for later...

Your post was intelligent, well written and certainly possible to code with the framework of the tablet's OS.

You know crap like that doesn't fly here anymore!

Stupid newb. *lol*

Hey, I found this site that seems to be the most comprehensive, at least statistically, out there.
http://www.iterated-prisoners-dilemma.net/

I did find one in flash that was nicely animated and showed real promise but it was still a work in progress.

Thanks for bringing this up.

It's a new game theory and concept I never heard of before.

Very interesting!

Addison.

Many thanks for the link... good reference material! And nice to know at least one other developer was already thinking this way. I think.

I could have sworn people have been able to play this on Telnet by searching through Google, which is something you're quite familiar with, but I couldn't find a single server or BBS site that still has it available.

Maybe you could have better luck with this.

The problem seems to be that pure Prisoner's Dilemma games can be pretty dry and limited. That's why what I was thinking of starts there but adds different twists. I don't think what I'm developing is PD in any classical sense.

I was thinking that some of the stuff you were proposing wasn't exactly prisoner's delimma, but rather some other form of non-zero sum game. I was waiting to pry more out of you before I said anything . I'm heading out for the night, but I'll be back tomorrow to see if I can contribute more.

So far I haven't found any algorithms that work with multiplayer scenarios, but I can surely cobble something evil up myself...

Since the player is a shareholder, I expect he will receive some sort of compensation in the form of dividends or something? Also, how will this impact the running of the "company" since really it comes down to a vote each turn as to what the company does as far as maintaining things and mining and selling. IE, if 20% of shareholds vote to contribute but 80% vote against it, then the Processor won't be maintained?

If players are going to lose turns for maintaining the Processor, some rational needs to be given for this. Are you going to come up with some explanation like the player himself is "spending" that turn "repairing" the Processor himself (and others who contributed), or what?

Sure there would be dividends. As to the next question, I'm not sure yet. In fact it may well take some testing to determine what works best.

Not sure how to rationalize the last part, but in a game, not everything has to be 100% realistic.

So how's progress?