General Description:

Wealth is measured in units called Rupyulars. Wealth is distributed by the monitor every three hours to participating systems as raw resources (each having a unit value in Rupyulars) or Rupyulars themselves. There are six kinds of resources and three kinds of products that may be manufactured from the resources. The resources are: oil, steel, plastic, copper, glass, and rubber. The products are: weapons, computers, and vehicles. A system's wealth can be increased (or perhaps decreased) by

1. Constructing finished products from the raw resources,
2. Making deals with other systems to exchange resources, products, or Rupyulars,
3. Stealing items of wealth from other systems,
4. Making war with another system,
5. Trading on the Monitor's open market.

Monitor:

The monitor is maintained by the instructor and an aid and has numerous important functions as follows:

1. It keeps track of who is alive (registered).
2. It keeps track of who owns what. Its database of wealth distribution is official. It keeps track of legitimate transactions and determines the winner and spoils in case of war.
3. It approves all communications. One reason for this is to slow down transaction rates to prevent network overload. A second reason is to be sure that the Monitor's database is always official.
4. Unwanted finished products and resources may be traded to the Monitor. Prices, in such cases, are determined solely by the Monitor, and the Monitor will not reveal what costs it requires. Players must simple try to see if the Monitor is willing to trade.
5. A system may attempt to read information about another system through the Monitor (an attempt may also be made to get a dim-witted system to divulge such information, independent of the Monitor). The more computers a system has, the better chance it has of obtaining secrets. The more security a system has, the better chance it has of protecting its secrets. A system may use computer resources to get a chance at guessing another system's secrets.

Player Systems:

Player systems do not always have to be running. However, they must be running for at least one hour in each three hour period to receive their share of resources in that period. When they are running, they will operate from a port on a .uc.edu address. Every time a system starts it must register with the monitor. A system may start, stop, and change ports many times during the day. This might be advantageous when hiding from an aggressive "power." Changes in this information is communicated by means of commands issued to the monitor. A system may be started on a different machine and a different port each time it goes on-line. However, there should only be one system per Player on-line at a time. This is enforced by the registration process: the monitor only allows transactions with the most recently registered port and address for a given user.

Although it is possible to use the Monitor without encryption, we strongly encourage that all transactions be encrypted using encryption facilities provided. If not, they could be intercepted by a "sniffer" and the contents used to fool the monitor into moving wealth around from one system to another or to determine resources, products, weapons, etc.

War Rules:

The following are the rules for waging, winning, and losing a war.

1. System A declares war on System B by making a request through the monitor. The monitor checks that System B is on-line in the location that System A indicated. If so, approval is granted to System A and System B is notified. System A and System B must determine how many units of weapons, and vehicles are to be used for the war. If not, System A looses 10% of the weapons and vehicles that System A committed to the war (as a penalty for not knowing where System B really was).
2. A war consists of a series of one or more battles. Battles are carried out periodically by the Monitor. Neither system can go off-line once a war begins. Doing so results in the forfeit and transfer of wealth to the opponent.
3. For weapons to count in a battle, each must have a vehicle to transport it. If either side runs out of vehicles or weapons, that side looses.
4. Outcome to battles is somewhat random, but the probabilities of winning is directly related to the amount of weapons fighting in that battle. The number of weapons that fight in a given battle is the minimum of the number of vehicles and the number of weapons currently available in the war.
5. After each battle, both sides loose some of the weapons and vehicles committed to the war. However, the losing side will have substantially greater losses.
6. Battles continue until a truce is negotiated, or one side has no more vehicles and/or weapons committed to the war.
7. Once one side is defeated, the victor is permitted to "pillage". The victor receives any remaining resources that the loser committed to the war, as well as some percentage of the loser's current wealth.

Trade Rules:

Systems may trade resources with each other as much as they would like. Systems may also with the Monitor. The Monitor does not necessarily have any resources at all, but it frequently has certain resources available. Trades with the Monitor are done with what the Monitor considers "fair market value", plus a percentage commission. This means that the Player is required to try different values of trades out until it finds one that the Monitor accepts.

Cracking Rules:

Cracking can be done in two ways. One way is the use the Player's computer resources and the various crack commands in the protocol.

The other way in which Players may "crack" another Player's system is by impersonating the Monitor. Learning how to do this is left as an exercise to the reader.

Wealth Calculation:

Every possible resource you hold has a value in rupyulars. That includes computers, vehicles, and weapons, as well as all the raw materials. In other words, it includes everything mentioned in PLAYER_STATUS output.

One rupyular is always worth one rupyular.

All the other resources have a value relative to rupyulars. The value is determined by the total of that item that are in the "world".

For example, if everyone has 1000 oil units each and only 10 rupyulars each, one unit of oil is worth much less than one rupyular. If no one has any computers, they are worth many, many rupyulars.

Note that the equations for calculating the relative value of something in rupyulars are complex. However, you can be sure that a *major* factor is the total sum of all those resources in the system (aka world). (Also, note that the Monitor holds some resources in an "open market", which also counts towards the total count in the system.)

Transactions:

Systems may communicate with each other through the Monitor to exchange resource, products, and Rupyulars. Such communication proceeds according to the published protocol.

Miscellany:

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this document materials provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this document under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that they are marked clearly as modified versions, that the authors' names and title are unchanged (though subtitles and additional authors' names may be added), and that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.