Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] RE: Zendo rules question

  • Fromkerry_and_ryan@xxxxxxx
  • DateTue, 19 Dec 2006 22:00:07 +0000
From: "Carol Townsend" <carol.townsend@xxxxxxxxx>
> I would be interested in examples of how to take these "not so good" rules
> and turn them into "better" rules - and then possible taking those "better"
> rules and turning them into "really great rules"
> 
> For example:
> Not so good:  "AKHTBN iff one piece points at the corner of another piece."
> is this better?  "AKHTBN iff one piece points at another piece."

Yes.  Rather than relying on a piece either pointing at a single point or not, this improved rule only requires that a piece point somewhere in this area.  The new rule does still suffer from edge case problems -- there's a fine line between one piece just barely poining at another and just barely NOT pointing at it.  But allowing the piece to point at a bigger target, cuts down on the number of such edge cases by, in my estimate, more than 90%.

> would it be even better to take this one more step to:  "AKHTBN iff exactly
> one piece points at only one other piece."

Once you go from pointing at specific zero-dimensional points to poining at 1-D lines (particularly if the line and the "pointing ray" are constrained to the surface of the table) or 2-D areas, specifying that EXACTLY one piece points at ONLY one other piece increases the difficulty level of the rule without introducing (or solving) any additional procedural problems.

> There are my quick, lame attempts at Koan editing - I'd love to see what
> others would do.

I'd do exactly what you did: make the rule about pointing at whole pieces instead of 0-D points and then added difficulty by adding more conditions.

Another option might be to specify that the pointing piece points at one of the triangular sides instead of the square base of another piece.

Or if you want to play around with the definition of pointing, you might specify that the pointing ray does NOT bend to skim along the table.  One effect of this would be that grounded
flat pieces wouldn't point at other pieces unless they were also touching the other pieces.

Or mayber there's a "backfire" ray, which starts at a pieces point and goes out through the center of the base.  Could you make a rule that relies on one piece pointing at another with that ray.  Maybe you could define rays that come out through the base corners instead of the top point.


There's always time for Zendo.

Ryan