Esoteric: Inside the Adjudicator's Head and Primary Parado..

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The current form and content of this article may be found
at the following web site address:
http://www.geocities.com/diplomacy [...] doxes.html

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Inside the Adjudicator's Head and Primary Paradoxes
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In many ways, this article is elementary. It's first function is to
help me
understand how an adjudicator realizes the orders of the military units
without
using an automated computer program. Keep in mind that there already
exist
well thought out and sophisticated algorithms, such as the Diplomacy
Players
Technical Guide (also referred to as DPTG).
http://www.amarriner.com/dip/dptg.php?games_id=22

Also please keep in mind that I am still very new to the game of
Diplomacy and
may, on occasion, make rather crude errors in my examples and thinking.
This is
due to the fact that Diplomacy is a rather difficult game to come to
terms with,
but hopefully no such crude errors will make it past the editing
process.

Other related topics, such as primary paradoxes, will surely be
relevant. Let's
first specify which paradoxical items we will not be discussing in this
article
(though these items probably will be addressed separately at a future
time). We
will not at this time be interested in paradoxical situations and rule
book
ambiguities and inconsistencies dealing with the following topics:
* What the actual operational order is for a military unit and whether
or not
it is valid and how this effects other support orders given to other
units. For
instance, we will not be concerned about whether a unit in Norway can
or cannot
be supported by other units if the unit in Norway is ordered to move to
the
planet Mars (the planet Mars is not a province on the Diplomacy map).
* Situations where an army can be convoyed by more than one convoy
will not be
discussed at this time.
* Situations where an army can be convoyed to a province that it could
also
legally walk to will not be discussed at this time.
* Situations where an army might be kidnapped by one fleet or another
will not
be discussed at this time.
* Situations involving issues related to self-dislodgement, dislodging
military
units that are of your country, supporting the dislodgement of military
units
that are of your country, and convoying in troops not of your country
which
attack a province either held by a unit of your country, supported by a
unit of
your country, or attacked by a unit of your country.

In short, this is why the title of this article concerns "Primary"
paradoxical
situations. This is not to say that the above issues are not
important, for
they are; however, I have arbitratily decided that they are not the
primary
concern and focus of my current research (though some of these topics
may be
researched in the future).

Concerning primary paradoxes (as defined above), we will be concerned
only with
either the 1971 rule book or the year 2000 fourth edition rule book.
Actually,
since the year 2000 fourth edition rule book is freely available
on-line from
the publisher in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, why don't we say instead
that we will
only be concerned with using the year 2000 fourth edition rule book for
the
duration of this article.

There will probably only be a couple rules of primary importance to our
investigation of primary paradoxes and these are now listed from the
year 2000
fourth edition rule book:
QUOTE: Page 10.
[Quoted material is not supplied in news group format; please see the
web site given above.]
UNQUOTE

QUOTE: Page 12.
[Quoted material is not supplied in news group format; please see the
web site given above.]
UNQUOTE

QUOTE: Page 16.
[Quoted material is not supplied in news group format; please see the
web site given above.]
UNQUOTE

Using the above quoted rules, and other more standard rules which most
people
are already familiar with, we have adequate material to create
paradoxical
positions on the Diplomacy board.

This article is not meant to be definitive; that should, I hope, be
obvious.
This article is more introductory in nature, and by writing and
thinking on this
topic, I hope to be better prepared to understand algorithms which have
previously been written by others and which are already in existance.

Finally, I can't emphasize enough how important feedback is in my
learning
process. Your comments, suggestions, corrections in reasoning and
logic, and
general contextual information is, and has been in the past,
exceedingly
important as I try to come to terms with the game of Diplomacy.

Let's begin!

What does it mean to say that a given game of Diplomacy has entered
into a
paradoxical situation? In my first introduction to paradoxical
situations on
the internet, the reasoning was given in an English statement,
something like
this: "The army was convoyed across and attacked its destination
province
cutting the support being offered by the target province; and, through
numerous
effects, too long to mention, it then says, and thus the original
convoy could
never have existed. We are at a paradox: how did the army get
convoyed across
when the convoy could never have existed?" Actually, the examples I
came
across on the internet were far better written than the sample I just
gave.

But, my point is this: for a minute, let's forget about trying to put
it in
English. Let's define a paradoxical situation a little more formally,
such as
like this: the game of Diplomacy enters into a paradoxical situation
when
legal move orders cannot be executed without violating important,
fundamental
rules of the game.

So, if an army was convoyed using two fleets, then after you have
executed all
the legal moves, none of those two fleets must have been dislodged,
otherwise
the convoying of the army could never have taken place. As another
example, if
a convoying fleet is supported by another fleet, and the convoying
fleet is
atttacked with a force of two by the enemy, then it is essential that
after
executing all the legal moves wherein one of the moves represented a
convoying
of an army using the convoying fleet, that this said supporting fleet
not have
had its contributory support function cut, otherwise the convoying
fleet would
have been dislodged, and the convoy could not have taken place. This
paragraph
may not be crystal clear; hopefully the examples to follow and the
annotation
of the adjudicator's thinking process will make all this clearer later
in this
article.

Let's speculate what the function of these important, fundamental rules
are:
I believe that these important, fundamental rules ensure that when all
legal
moves are executed, it will be as if the army units had been
simultaneously
thrown into action, even if in actuality the adjudicator moves one unit
at a
time until all legal moves have been executed on the Diplomacy playing
board.

Why is it important to create a game and to create rules where the
simultaneous
movement of the military units of the baord is important? I'm not sure
at this
time. But, as openers, each players order's are revealed
simultaneously. One
reason might be that in primary paradoxical situations, if one player
moved
before another, the player that moved first would have a distinct
advantage. In
situations not containing a paradox, I don't think it really matters
who moves
first, the result should be the same as if all the units moved
simultaneously
(but I have not yet thought about this overly much).

What is an important, fundamental rule? Well, pretty much all the
rules having
to do with how to move a unit, how to support a unit, how to cut the
support
being provided by a unit, convoying rules, dislodgement rules, and so
forth.

By the way, I forgot to mention that we will not be investigating any
cases
having to do with what happens after it is determined that a military
unit has
been dislodged. This will keep our discussion tightly knit.

The rest of this article is rather elemetary as I warned earlier. I
will
present examples (not all of them paradoxical), and speculate as to the
reasoning process carried out by the adjudicator. In this way, readers
of this
article can correct any misunderstandings I have about this process.
The end
result will be a road map that people might decide to use when they
adjudicate
their in-home, face-to-face Diplomacy games; however, since primary
paradoxes
might constitute most of the core of the examples, perhaps this article
may not
really be the best, first road map someone follows when learning the
game.

THIS ARTICLE IS NOT YET COMPLETED. But, any comments and corrections
you have
on what I have written so far is much appreciated. Thanks.