Stoofer's 2nd Law

[Mr Stoofer]

Stoofer's 2nd Law

states:

As a discussion in the Mafia Discussion Forum grows longer, the probability of someone voting for someone else in the thread approaches 1

.

It happened a couple of days ago in Yo

u know you have been playing too much Mafia when...

and is getting out of hand there. It has just happened in

Mafia Tells

.

::edit:: Turbovolver has pointed out that Stoofer's 1st Law is actually something else, so I have renamed this law Stoofer's 2nd Law.

[Mr Stoofer]

at Aelyn for spotting my inspiration!

[Mr Stoofer]

Godwin?

See Aelyn's post 2.

[Mr Stoofer]

Oh, but there is. Let's bring up another of Stoofer's Laws, if I may:

In a C9 game, a townie lynch on day one will have both scum on the lynchwagon.

He brought it up in a game I was in with him, and if we believe his statistics it has like an 80% success rate (sample size: 8 or so). The reason I put it out there is to see if other people have found it to be true or untrue in their experience.

It is OK that I say this, right Mr. Stoofer? I mean it's already sort of public knowledge when you posted it up in our game. If not, sorry

Turbovolver is quite right, This ought to be Stoofer's 1st Law in fact, since I have been propounding this for some time.

Note it only applies to C9 games, and therefore wouldn't apply to the invitational.

[Mr Stoofer]

If you exclude one game with a self-voter, its about 80% in finished games I've been in. I noticed that Newbie 182 was just lost by the town on day 3. If the town had applied the rule it would have won.

[Mr Stoofer]

The formula for Stoofer's 2nd Law is:

P=1-k/n

Where P = probablility of a vote in the thread
n = number of posts in the thread
k = the Stoofer constant, which has yet to be determined.

::edited due to being rubbish::

[Mr Stoofer]

My guess is that k is approximately 0.99283704157921304510793511709375923.
But this needs to be verified by experiment.

::edited due to being rubbish::

[Mr Stoofer]

Norinel, the "rule" applies to all pro-town roles, not just townies. I think your stats nin psts 36 are limited to vanilla townies, which is not the intention.

[Mr Stoofer]

as stated Stoof's II is

always

true, so I only needed to find one counterexample.

In a C9 game, if a pro-town player is lynched on day 1, both scum were

probably

on the lynch.

Vote: Norinel

for getting the number of the Law wrong and misrepresenting the terms thereof (see: Stoofer's 1st Law). Even though, on your stats, it isn't true.

Although your Newbie Game, which just finished, obeyed the law .

[Mr Stoofer]

But Norinel's post came

after

I added the word "probably"!

[Mr Stoofer]

I like it! I'll add that to the Wiki for Stoofer's 2nd Law

[Mr Stoofer]

Vote: Anyone who thinks that Stoofer's 2nd law is satisfied by picking out random letters from a number of different of posts

[Mr Stoofer]

With a great use of my precious free time, I have determined

Stoofer's Constant, K, to be equal to 155

, in the equation P = 1 - (K/(K+n)). (Using experimental data from the latest five pages of Mafia Discusion - I did not include any topics after Mr. Stoofer stated his second law, as it seemed biased. Then I fiddled around in excel for a while, trying to find a way to determine the probability. My probably incomprehencible excel file can be downloaded here: http://members.shaw.ca/abphillips/new_o ... toofsK.xls)

Time for an update on this, I think. What is Stoofer's Constant in respect of posts over the last 12 months? (i.e. since Thok's Corollory and mith's Observation started to have effect?)

[Mr Stoofer]

Good work big Al. Let's aim to get Stoofer's Constant down below 100 for the year 2007.

[Mr Stoofer]

Let's aim to get Stoofer's Constant down below 100 for the year 2007.

[Mr Stoofer]

There were only six threads that didn't have a vote in the first 100 posts.)

Where? I'll soon sort that out.

[Mr Stoofer]

You know, I think this trend has been reducing recently. Hopefully this necrotastic bump will change that.