My friend Finan wrote up an account of the 2018 Seattle and Oxford Petrov Day Faux Nuclear Crisis.
Recognizing this, a couple of community members in Seattle whipped up a program to have mutually assured party destruction for Petrov Day. In the game you are told if the other party has launched and given time to retaliate if you so choose. Both parties successfully made it through several false alarms without nuking each other. It could be a testament to our general feelings of well being towards each other, and to lack of real incentive to nuke the other party–aside from protecting your own.
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One of the partygoers in Seattle pressed the launch button at -1 seconds. 1 second past the end time, they were assuming the game was over and enjoying the humor of an actually quite low stakes game. The server and the Seattle computer were slightly out of sync, so although the game appeared over from the Seattle end, it was not according to the server.
“If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake. ” – Eliezer Yudkowsky
The “Big Red Button” approach to the day has only been around for the last 3 years, but it’s seen some adoption since. This is notably the first time that the button has been pressed at a party.
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