Ryan H. wrote:
Bottom Line: Does a rule that involves spelling or language violate the Spock Rule?
My opinion is that it does not violate the Spock rule. My reasoning is that the master is simply assigning letter values to each pyramid, and enforcing a simple (if extraordinarily large) set of constraints on koans based on those values. Many competitors in the international Scrabble competitions do not speak English, and have no idea what many of the words they play actually mean, they have just memorized lists of legal letter combinations. That said, the larger problem seems to be that you have a master who believes the object of the game is to come up with rules that the players will have a difficult time figuring out. The object of the game is not to embarrass the players with their inability to figure out the rule, but to embarrass the players with how long it took them to figure out such a simple rule. -- Elliott C. "Eeyore" Evans eeyore@xxxxxxxx