Talk:Chops Considered Harmful

The problem of chops

Good to see a chop essay, they've felt like a weird part of the metagame for too long. I'd agree that the concept's cultural cost has been significant: I'm not sure how the dates line up in practice, but it feels as if the widespread adoption of the term (from around 2022?) probably set the stage for the game's Slouch Era.

Pascal and Fermat deserve a shout-out for their work on how to resolve a cut-short game in the problem of points, which you cover some of the ground of with your talk of finding mechanisms: determining the winner proportionally to scores so far is seen as a naive 15th century approach, and it makes more sense to look at the range of possible future outcomes. I don't know how often we've tried to model that in merit-random victories. The Surwheelism Metadynasty is the only literal example I can think of, where rather than "lottery based on plaques held" we went with "randomly assign further plaques until someone reaches the target amount" (manually skipping the slouch players), but that dynasty was unusually random and easy to model. The Alien DNA discussion considered future potential over past actions, and had some introspection about whether it really made sense to risk ranking a slouch player above an active one.

Looking to the future, could it be worth steering our definition of "chop" to very specifically mean "select randomly among some numbered variable", explicitly making it a crude and generally undesirable subset of merit-random? (Or keeping the word for any "chopping the game short" situation, and giving random variable selection another name like "lottery".) --Kevan (talk) 13:24, 2 June 2026 (UTC)