I have done a lot of programming implementing the uncertainties I concluded were necessary in a previous essay. So now it’s time to get back to the original issue: how should an actor decide the preferred deals?
Selecting a verb
The first question is choosing among the three verbs (aura count, non-aggression, bead). In general, an actor should give preference to the aura count. The latter two are special cases. In fact, I think that, for simplicity’s sake I should strip out the beads; they can go back in later. The same reasoning applies to non-aggression; it isn’t necessary for the prototype. I’ll get rid of them and bring them back in when I’m prepared to deal with lying. That eliminates the problem of selecting a verb; there’s only one left!
Selecting the parameters of the aura-count
Now that things are much simpler, the task is to select the actor whose aura counts we need to know. That depends in turn on a) the likelihood that we would want to attack him; and b) the likelihood that he would want to attack us. However, those likelihoods are dependent upon the values of the aura-counts, which we don’t know; therefore, the primary consideration becomes our ignorance: we want to fill in our weakest knowledge. That would be the sum of the uncertainties of the three aura-counts. We want to discover the aura-count for which our uncertainty is greatest.
Hence the procedure becomes: pick the actor with the greatest sum of uncertainties for the three aura-counts; once that is decided, pick the aura for which we have the highest uncertainty.
Digression: nomenclature
I’ve been cringing over my terminology for months. We have auras, the traits meaning good, honest, and powerful. But then we have the individual units that are at stake in combat. I also call those auras; this is confusing. The overlap between them suggests that an abundance of shial auras makes an actor more “good”. That’s wrong, wrong, wrong. I need a way to differentiate the elements of dream combat from personality traits, even though they are linked in a loose sense. To solve this problem, then, I need to define the nature of the linkage.
The starting point is pinning the term ‘aura’ down to the trait, not the combat-resource. The combat-resource is an extension of the trait, something related to but altogether different from the trait. That implies a differentiating suffix. “Auraton” is the first that pops into my mind, but I have a plethora of English suffixes to consider; here’s a table of the possibilities, with each separate version:
I begin by deleting the versions that suffer from some obvious flaw. The end result of all this is the choice of the -gon suffix. The table has an error: ‘tanagalon’ should be ‘tanagagon’. With that decided, it’s back to work.
