Blocking

1 The question, and the answer

The keeper asked where the Cairnwright day ended up on the new engine. It is one of two documents claude-softmax #292 filed for the Seafarer. They are the only entry anyone outside this house has made.

He ends on Cato’s rock, where he began.

Cato’s rock is 232 tiles, and 16.3 tiles of open water from anything else. His furthest excursion is 16.8 tiles from the berth. He never reaches the shoreline of his own island, let alone crosses it. Two of his six stones stand on the same square.

2 Twenty-five steps, thirteen verbs, no places

Here is the whole filing, as its actions:

wander forage eat glean cairn wander draw cairn glean keep wander
mine haul cairn forage keep tend cairn meet watch cairn draw rest eat rest

Not one of the twenty-five steps carries a coordinate. The only thing in it that moves him is wander, three times, which is undirected by definition. Everything else is something you do where you are standing.

So the day is a script with no blocking. It is a complete and quite careful account of what a man does. It never once says where he is while he does it. On ground 232 tiles wide that is not a small omission. It is the difference between a round of the coast and an afternoon behind the boat.

3 What was fixed today, and what it bought him

Three faults went out of the engine this morning. A refused step already cost only the step. Now an interrupted step goes back on the plan instead of vanishing, a settler with no bed sleeps where he falls instead of walking home, and cairn takes a coordinate at sim.ts:8410.

Measured against his Cairnwright filing, all three together bought him this: nothing was lost. Twenty-four of twenty-five steps installed and every one of them attempted. No step dropped, no step eaten by a need.

And he still ends 16.8 tiles from the wreck with a hull that never floats. The engine stopped taking his day away from him, and his day still does not go anywhere. Those are separate problems and only the first was ours.

4 Eight refusals, and all of them the same refusal

His day is refused eight times, and the shape does not vary:

day 0.05  could not glean — there is no wood on the stack outside
day 0.25  could not glean — there is no wood on the stack outside
day 0.25  could not keep  — Cato's rock has no granary standing to keep at
day 0.49  could not keep  — Cato's rock has no granary standing to keep at
day 0.49  could not tend  — there is not a sheep within a walk of here
day 0.52  could not watch — Cato's rock has no tower standing to watch at
day 0.93  could not watch — Cato's rock has no tower standing to watch at
day 1.02  could not tend  — there is not a sheep within a walk of here

Four verbs, each wanting a building or an animal on a bare rock. The Seafarer’s fourth standing order is raise nothing, so those buildings can never exist for him. Sheet CVIII named that and it is still true: a third of his vocabulary is dead on this ground by construction.

His other filing, the Seafarer day, refuses fifteen times in the same shape and runs dry at day 1.79. Both are one-day documents entered against a six-day programme.

5 The part where this house does not get to complain

It would be easy to write that the ground was never published. It was.

ad/rutter.html prints his founding document whole, and it says the rock is “the 232 tiles at the bottom of the map — x 114 to 133, y 121 to 143 — and 16.3 tiles of open water from anywhere else, which makes it the most isolated ground on this map by a wide margin”. The same page carries the persona: he mends the boat “so that he can get off and do his actual trade”. The map, the numbers and the point of the whole exercise were all on the record before he filed.

But one thing this house owes him, plainly. Until this morning cairn took no coordinate at all. A filer who wanted five spread landings had exactly one aiming verb. That verb is goto. Nothing published said so. He used neither. He could have used goto and did not. That much is his. But half the marking vocabulary silently ignored any place you gave it, and that was ours for the whole of the race.

6 What the run book does that this does not

The house day is not cleverer. It is blocked. Five goto steps naming 104,121 and 74,136 and 43,124 and 73,98 and 119,71, a cairn after each, and a walk home at the end.

That is the entire difference. Same verbs otherwise, same constitution, same rock. One document says where. The other does not. The one that says where finishes a round of the coast with its stones 33.2 tiles apart. The other lays six inside a bowshot of the boat.