Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] Zendo Puzzle

  • FromJoshua Kronengold <mneme@xxxxxx>
  • DateThu, 12 Mar 2009 15:41:13 -0500
David L. Willson writes:
>And I think that's 209 possible white koans now, if I was right about
>the other to begin with, which I probably wasn't, but JK will be along
>tao loudly correct me and draw aspersions on my literacy, I imagine. 

Please don't engage in personal attacks here.

And if you can't take it without rancor, don't throw it. (the last
discussion was quite pleasant until certain people, you included,
started proclaiming their way as "the one true way". I just got
annoyed when you made a false equality in support of your position.)


>{upright, flat, weird} or {upright, flat-left, flat-right} (as in Treehouse).  In either case, "Yes, I missed it."

Personally, I'd look at "all pieces are in a line" as a fidly rule and
not use it; when I run SET, I use a nice simple "contains (or consists
entirely of) three pices for which the following properties are either all
the identical or all different among those three pieces: orientation
(upright, wierd, flat), size, color.

The problem (IMO) with left/right orientations is that you need a
baseline.  Which means you need to specify something like "all pieces
are on a line" or "all pieces are in parallel.

Which is the kind of rule (grossly) that is of the form "medium-difficulty
rule, precondition of other medium-difficulty rule" which, as in in the
"three-state zendo" discussion, I find makes for a much more difficult
rule than one expects (which is why I'm interested in experimenting
with breaking down those rules into three different states, to make
them much more tractable for players).

IOW, I think that unless it's an illegal zendo rule (ie, absolute left
and right, rather than defined within the koan), that an "upright,
left, right" SET rule is -substantially- harder than a normal SET
rule.

-- 
       Joshua Kronengold (mneme@(io.com, labcats.org)) |\      _,,,--,,_  ,)
--^--   "Did you know, if you increment enough, you   /,`.-'`'   -,  ;-;;'
 /\\    get an extra digit?"  "I knew," weeps Six.    |,4-  ) )-,_ ) /\     
/-\\\   "We knew. But we had forgotten."	     '---''(_/--' (_/-'

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