Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

[Icehouse] fuzzy terms in Zendo...

  • FromAlison <alison@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateMon, 20 Mar 2006 12:34:59 -0500
I think you're confusing the concept of Rule and Koan.  See below.

--On Friday, March 10, 2006 4:23 PM -0800 Subhan Tindall <subhan.michael@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think I actually have a  grammar for koan generation somewhere I
sponged off the individual who wrote Zendomizer (PalmOS program for
generating Koans http://www.geocities.com/~karlvonl/Zendomizer.html
Some work would be involved in the initial setup, but a large # of
koans could be generated and categorized according to the sets of
features that they match(basically Koans are physical implementations
of abstract logic statements about sets of features and can be treated
as points in N-space which allows for fairly straightforward pattern
matching)
Once you have a large database of Koans, and a grammar it seems like
it would be fairly straightforward to generate a base Koan (AKHTBNI
blah blah blah), then select an image from the set of images that
match the koan, and an image that does not match the koan.
Players are constrained to building koans/making guesses based on the
implemented feature sets(not necessarily as restrictive as it sounds
in practice).  They can make the picture any way the like (or no
picture at all :-), and submit a description of it based on the
feature set.  This is then compared against the master Koan...

It seems to me like you are confusing or merging the idea of a Koan (a grouping of pyramids) with the idea of the Rule (the quality or qualities any given Koan must have in order to have the Buddha-nature). The Zendomizer generates random _Rules_ not Koans, and you can't really create a "master Koan" with which to compare all other Koans with. Any given Koan (arrangement of pyramids) has so many qualities, some of which are pertinent to it's having the BN, and some of which are not. If you compare student Koans to a "master Koan" you're just asking if they match it - then there's only one arrangement that has the BN?

I'm sure you understand how to play Zendo, but your terminology is fuzzy and confusing, that's all.



-Alison