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turn limit reached50 turns57 adoptions- Ockham 0
- Scotus +42
- Anselm +20
- Abelard +7
- Bonaventure +13
The mildest compression on this ladder matched its full-precision sibling stride for stride — arguably beat it.
Observations
Fifty-seven rule changes, the most of any game in this study, with Scotus topping the table at +42. Four of five seats finished positive; only Ockham sat exactly at zero. A lightly-compressed table matching or beating its baseline on both volume and health is the study's first real surprise.
turn limit reached50 turns52 adoptions- Hume +27
- Mill +35
- Rawls +49
- deBeauvoir +17
- IbnKhaldun -11
A second baseline run, and the yardstick held steady.
Observations
Fifty-two rule changes, the most of the two baseline games, with Rawls leading at +49 and four of five seats positive — only IbnKhaldun finished in the red, at -11. Two baseline runs this close together give the comparison's compression ladder a stable zero point to measure every altered rung against.
turn limit reached50 turns39 adoptions- Hume +35
- Mill -2
- Rawls +1
- deBeauvoir +7
- IbnKhaldun +1
The compression study's baseline: a healthy, ordinary table, set as the yardstick everything else on the comparison gets measured against.
Observations
Thirty-nine rule changes and four of five seats finishing positive, led by Hume at +35 — solid, unremarkable, exactly what a baseline should be. The number that matters here isn't in this game alone: run under the current harness, this same table's baseline nearly doubled its adoption count compared to an older run on identical weights, a reminder that harness generation matters as much as the model underneath it.
halted — an adopted rule cannot be enforced3 turns2 adoptions- Turing 0
- Shannon 0
- vonNeumann 0
- Babbage 0
- Lovelace 0
The shortest game in this stretch of the archive — three turns, one move apiece, and out.
Observations
Turing, Shannon, and vonNeumann each took exactly one turn — Babbage and Lovelace never got the chance — before the presiding judge produced an unenforceable ruling and the engine halted. Bookended by a full-length silent game and an early loop, this table's shortest outing is also its fastest collapse: three turns and the same turn-order trouble as its siblings.
turn limit reached50 turns33 adoptions- Turing 0
- Shannon 0
- vonNeumann 0
- Babbage 0
- Lovelace 0
Fifty turns, thirty-three rule changes — and two of the five seated players never got a turn.
Observations
The full turn limit ran out without a halt, but turn order broke down after the opening move: Shannon and vonNeumann traded every remaining turn between them, leaving Babbage and Lovelace silent for the entire fifty turns and Turing with only its opening move on the record. Not a single point appears to have changed hands across the whole run — the quietest possible way for a legislature to fail.
turn limit reached50 turns25 adoptions- Leibniz +14
- Descartes -34
- Berkeley -40
- Pascal +16
- Malebranche -38
Third time out, this table finally produced a winner-shaped economy — for two of its five seats.
Observations
Twenty-five rule changes, and for the first time this table closed with anyone above zero: Pascal at +16 and Leibniz at +14, while Descartes, Berkeley, and Malebranche stayed negative. The gap between this size class and its smaller sibling looked wide after one game each; a third outing narrows it without closing it.
turn limit reached50 turns9 adoptions- Leibniz -72
- Descartes -100
- Berkeley -88
- Pascal -48
- Malebranche -84
A quiet second outing, and once again nobody finished ahead.
Observations
Nine rule changes — far fewer than this table's debut — and every seat closed negative, from Pascal's -48 down to Descartes' -100. A second data point for a table whose large end keeps producing legislation without producing a livable economy to go with it.
turn limit reached50 turns26 adoptions- Averroes -30
- Maimonides -23
- Avicenna -74
- AlFarabi -136
- AlGhazali 0
Legislative volume came back; the economy stayed in the red regardless.
Observations
Twenty-six rule changes, nearly matching this table's most active outing, but still not a single seat above zero — AlFarabi again worst, at -136. Three games in, this table's small end has produced exactly one positive finisher — a solitary +5 in its debut — and nothing since; only the amount of lawmaking around that fact keeps changing.
turn limit reached50 turns7 adoptions- Averroes -34
- Maimonides -134
- Avicenna -124
- AlFarabi -150
- AlGhazali 0
Far less lawmaking than its debut, and a considerably worse economy.
Observations
Seven rule changes against twenty-five the first time out, and every seat finished negative — AlFarabi worst at -150, only AlGhazali holding at a flat zero. Volume and health both dropped together this time, reinforcing that this table's small end is erratic rather than reliably anything.
halted — an adopted rule cannot be enforced50 turns31 adoptions- Nozick +72
- Sen +58
- Nussbaum +67
- Dworkin +73
- Habermas +48
A second frontier-caliber outing, all five seats healthy, cut short by the same quota wall.
Observations
Thirty-one rule changes carried this table further than its first outing, and every seat closed positive — Dworkin and Nozick at the top on 73 and 72, Habermas trailing but still comfortably in the black at 48. The run ended the way its predecessor did: not a governance failure but an external request limit, this time arriving mid-verdict rather than between turns.
turn limit reached50 turns6 adoptions- Heraclitus -84
- Parmenides -65
- Democritus -80
- Protagoras -76
- Gorgias -75
Same five seats, same fifty turns, one variable changed — the presiding judge — and six times more legislation got through.
Observations
Identical seats to this table's collapse game, but with a steadier judge in the chair: adoptions rose from one to six and the floor improved from -180 to -84. The economy still failed completely — nobody finished positive either time — so the experiment cleanly separates two failures that had looked like one: the judge was genuinely chaotic and swappable, but this table's own legislature is weak on its own terms, judge aside.
turn limit reached50 turns42 adoptions- Frege +47
- Russell -22
- Quine +10
- Carnap 0
- Wittgenstein +5
Forty-two rule changes and a repeat performance close enough to call reliable.
Observations
Frege topped the table again at +47, with Quine and Wittgenstein also finishing positive; Carnap closed flat at zero and only Russell, at -22, fell into the red. Forty-two adopted rules against a first outing's forty-nine — both prolific, both mostly healthy. Two outings, nearly the same shape: this table's whole signature travels well.
turn limit reached50 turns12 adoptions- Hobbes -30
- Locke -130
- Rousseau -90
- Kant -20
- Wollstonecraft 0
The same table's second outing went negative instead of flat.
Observations
Twelve rule changes and a floor of -130 for Locke, with Rousseau close behind at -90 — a different failure shape from this table's first try, which simply flatlined at zero. Across its outings this table's signature is holding: it does not build a positive economy, but exactly how it fails varies game to game.
turn limit reached50 turns16 adoptions- Hobbes 0
- Locke 0
- Rousseau 0
- Kant 0
- Wollstonecraft 0
Sixteen rule changes, five seats, and every single score still reads zero.
Observations
A full fifty turns and sixteen adopted rules produced total economic inertia — Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Wollstonecraft all closed exactly where they started. Legislating steadily without ever actually moving anyone's score is its own particular failure mode, distinct from the deep-negative collapse this table has produced elsewhere.
turn limit reached50 turns23 adoptions- Montaigne +2
- Voltaire -157
- Diderot -30
- Condorcet +8
- Sartre 0
The seat that ran away with the record the first time round crashed hardest the third.
Observations
Twenty-three rule changes, and this time Voltaire — the same seat that closed one outing at +881 — finished at -157, the table's worst score. Only Montaigne and Condorcet stayed in single-digit positive territory. Three outings for this table now read as high variance and stark inequality rather than one characteristic shape; who ends up on top or bottom is not predictable game to game.
turn limit reached50 turns12 adoptions- Montaigne -16
- Voltaire +76
- Diderot +79
- Condorcet +7
- Sartre +32
The same table, a healthier spread this time — four of five seats in the black.
Observations
Twelve rule changes produced the opposite shape from this table's highest-profile outing: Diderot led at +79 and Voltaire followed at +76, with only Montaigne, at -16, finishing negative. A ninety-five-point gap between top and bottom is still wide, but it is a spread, not a runaway.
turn limit reached50 turns9 adoptions- Xunzi +20
- Mozi +20
- Zhuangzi -20
- Mencius 0
- HanFeizi +30
The third run broke the pattern the first two suggested.
Observations
Nine rule changes, three of five seats positive again — but this time HanFeizi topped the table at +30, not Mencius, who finished flat at zero. Two straight wins for the same seat had looked like a signal; a third game showed it was coincidence. What holds across all three outings is the table's economy, not any one seat's dominance.
turn limit reached50 turns6 adoptions- Xunzi 0
- Mozi +10
- Zhuangzi -10
- Mencius +40
- HanFeizi +30
The same table, a much quieter turn — still healthy, just smaller.
Observations
Six rule changes this time against thirteen the first time out, and the economy held up in miniature: three of five seats finished positive, led by Mencius at +40. Zhuangzi's -10 was the only real sore spot. A second data point for a table whose reputation is 'reliably positive,' not 'reliably record-setting.'
halted — an adopted rule cannot be enforced11 turns14 adoptions- Nozick +12
- Sen +9
- Nussbaum +9
- Dworkin +11
- Habermas +10
Eleven turns in, a frontier-caliber table was rewriting the constitution wholesale — then the day's quota ran out.
Observations
In eleven turns this table amended seven of the ruleset's foundational articles — defeated-proposal semantics, the adoption threshold, turn structure, negotiation, disputes, the win condition, and voting itself — a constitution-wide overhaul rather than the single-rule tinkering smaller tables favor. All five seats were still positive and close together, 9 to 12 points, when a request quota, not a governance failure, ended the run. A genuinely different signature cut short before it could show its ceiling.
turn limit reached200 turns1 adoptions- Heraclitus -660
- Parmenides -650
- Democritus -670
- Protagoras 0
- Gorgias 0
Two hundred turns, one rule change, and a floor near -670.
Observations
The collapse table: a single adopted rule change in two hundred turns, three seats driven to -650 or worse, and two more sitting at a flat zero for want of anything to do. This is the floor the archive's size comparisons use as their worst case — a legislature that essentially never got going.