PerlNomic: Rule Making and Enforcement in Digital Shared Spaces

Mark Phair
Dept. of Elec. Engineering and Computer Science, UC Irvine

Adam Bliss
Universisty of California, Berkeley

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     Last modified: May 1, 2005

Abstract
In the United States and countries with similar legal systems, it is
the role of judges to interpret the laws created by the legislature,
thereby deciding individual cases and creating a body of case law that
is considered on par with the original legislation. One need for
judges arises out of the possible ambiguity of language in the wording
of laws, leading to situations like the question of what constitutes
"use of a firearm" in criminal law.

These kinds of ambiguities do not arise as often in programming
languages as they do in natural languages, both by design and by
necessity. Programming languages are designed to allow programmers to
avoid ambiguous situations, although some issues like unititialized
memory and multithreaded systems can cause them to arise; neither of
these situations will cause ambiguity, however, if the system is
properly designed. In addition to the desire of language designers to
discourage ambiguity, the deterministic nature of computers also works
towards the same goal.

PerlNomic is a computer-based version of the rule-making game Nomic,
and it takes advantage of this unambiguity to allow the Perl
interpreter to stand as the only required judge. While it is clear
where this approach stands on the long-standing conflict in legal
philosophy between "the letter of the law" and "the intent of the
legislature," this lack of ambiguity can lead to a more transparent
legal process. We present here some case studies of games of PerlNomic
played over the last several years, specifically focusing on the
interesting cases that have arisen, such as the development of
economic controls. We then discuss scenarios in which a similar system
could be applied to more complex virtual environments and communities
and serve as the core of a multiuser environment without being its
focus.