The Independence Game | Hacker News Reader

The Independence Game

solipsys.co.uk

77 pointsColinWright14 comments

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.)

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".

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.

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

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 :)

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".

There's evidence that civilization is becoming more distributed -- increasing specialization in the trades, more joint publishing and shared Nobels in the sciences, chat replacing e-mail, social media replacing correspondence, increasing trade share of GDP, etc. To the extent it's part of this process, and to the extent such a world is more capable, more peaceful... it's a good thing.

I personally hate it.

Incidentally - and not accusing you of it - but the fear of expressing negativity here is another issue, which reminds me quite a lot of the Twilight Zone episode, "It's a Good Life".[1] I rather prefer Bram Cohen's approach: "Focus on the negative. It's what needs fixing."[2]

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734580/

[2] https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/248845743081807872

> 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.

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?

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.

> How can I convince you this is worth reading?

I discovered that it was … by reading it:-)

Sometimes when i attempt to read long form articles, they feel padded for no good reason. All too often i have to scroll a third or more down the text before i find what the headline was alluding to in the first place.

I trust that's not the case here - I worked pretty hard to start with something genuinely interesting in its own right, and draw the reader deeper and deeper to one of the most amazing results in Combinatorial Game Theory, finally returning to show how it is used in the original setting.

No padding intended - please tell me if you think anything can be cut, trimmed, condensed, or reduced.

Thank you.

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