
The Independence Game - ColinWright
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheIndependenceGame.html
======
gus_massa
I was slightly confused by one of the last remarks:

> _Take a specific example such as 0.6 - also known as "Officers."_

After reading carefully, it was clear that it is the notation/name for an
octal game. Perhaps it would be nice to add the word "octal" somewhere in that
sentence or a link to an explanation of the game.

\--

If I understand correctly, in the 0.6 game:

* The isolated tokens are immortal, so you must ignore them.

* You can remove one token from the extreme of a row that has at least 2 tokens.

* You can remove one token from any place inside a row and spit it in two parts (that may have a different number of tokens).

* (If you remove the second or next to last token in a row of length N, you get a row of length N-2 and an isolated token that is not useful for any further move. So this is equivalent to removing the first or last two tokens.)

~~~
ColinWright
Wording changed to allow reference to it being an Octal Game, and the footnote
marker has been included. And you are right in your description. Specifically:

* A move consists of removing exactly one token from any heap.

* You may not leave an empty heap;

* You may leave the rest of the tokens as a single heap;

* You may divide the remaining tokens into exactly two heaps.

That is basically just a re-wording of what you have already said, but using
"heaps" instead of "rows".

------
nebabyte
Naming schema reminds me of this encoding used to refer to variants of
conway's game of life, where numbers correspond to the conditions by which
cells are created/maintained/destroyed etc.

It's interesting to see games in their 'traditional' sense be abstracted to
fundamental components which can then be used to codify variants. Gives me
hope for the whole "modding/remixing" culture.

------
beefman
I can't help but feel this story's score (after 3 hours) of 9 is far too low.

~~~
chrstphrhrt
Looks very interesting, but too long for giving it sufficient attention in the
morning before/during work. By the evening when I check HN again it will
probably have been buried by more fleeting news-like stories.

Sometimes I wish there was a TrueHN or LongFormHN section that would separate
the monkish/deeper stories from the mainline/fashionable links. For now
bookmarks will do :)

~~~
ColinWright
Yup - the attention economy. If you can't read something in under 5 minutes,
if it actually takes time and effort to understand and appreciate, then it
doesn't matter how much it will reward that time and effort, it doesn't matter
how interesting it is, no one will read it.

<fx: sad face />

If that sounds a little bitter, it's not intended to. It's intended as an
explicit recognition of a reality. Is this a problem? For those who think it
_is_ a problem, the first step to solving a problem is to recognise it for
what it is.

Maybe there is space on HN for a new headline, alongside "ask", "jobs", and
"show". Maybe there is space for "LongForm".

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> If you can't read something in under 5 minutes, if it actually takes time
> and effort to understand and appreciate, then it doesn't matter how much it
> will reward that time and effort, it doesn't matter how interesting it is,
> no one will read it.

Well... I've seen too many long-form articles that promised me a payoff, took
a lot of time on style, and never really delivered. I have come to think that
they're too high a cost and too low odds on the payoff happening - unless I
have some reason to think that the odds on a particular article are higher
than normal.

~~~
ColinWright
I'd like to think that's not the case here. Assuming it's not, what should be
done? How can I convince you this is worth reading?

Will you _ever_ bother reading a long article?

> _unless I have some reason to think that the odds on a particular article
> are higher than normal._

Is it enough that it's been on the HN Front Page for hours, and it has 38
points?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Actually, I've started reading _this_ long article, based on the comments
here.

The HN comments can give me a pretty good feel for whether I want to bother
reading it. For a long-form article, the comments here may be shorter, more
informative, more entertaining, or even all three.

