hexwab

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkZPMf73qYc is a presentation by the authors. I haven't seen this linked widely.

I played a game, got my estimated rating (pretty accurate!), and a modal dialog box offering me the choice of "enter my email to create a account" or "forget me and play again". Immediately my heart sank. It's 2022, I have enough accounts on enough websites to last a lifetime and am super-sick of the whole "we've sent you an email, be sure to click the link to verify" dance.

Most importantly, what I actually wanted to do was get the game out and analyse it. But now the text was no longer selectable so I had to go grubbing around in devtools.

Turns out the "forget me and play again" button just dismissed the popup and didn't actually start a new game but I had no way of knowing this short of playing another test game in another tab.

Suggestions: (a) don't use modal dialog boxes! Let me create an account in the middle of a game if I want. Let me copy and paste the moves at any time, including after the game is over. Don't have a button to "play again" if it's not actually going to play again.

(b) asking for email addresses annoys the hell out of people. Let me play again without forgetting who I am. If I want my identity to persist across browser sessions then sure, let me create a username and password. If I want to be sure I don't forget the password, sure, let me tie it to an email address. But it should be step three, not step one. Otherwise people will just never come back.

(c) "excited", "Thanks for the game", the eyebrows? It's a bot, it's not capable of excitement or gratitude or facial expressions. Pretending it is seems, well, patronizing. It's reminiscent of chess.com with its cutesy bots (and persistent nagging).

I can highly recommend the late David Mackay's _Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms_. To my mind it's a much easier read than the above book.

http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html

Associated lecture series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLruBu5BI5n4aFpG32iMbd...

It may not work in dosbox, but mushroom.ovl is just raw 8-bit[1] linear audio sampled at 8kHz so you can load it up in your raw-audio-capable app of choice. On linux try "aplay mushroom.ovl", for example.

[1] Actually only 6 bits per byte are used; presumably this was done to improve decoding speed or something.

So here's an idea for a game. Let's call it "inductive bridge".

1) Rules of play are as for standard contract bridge.

2) You may use whatever conventions you like. There is no obligation to tell anybody what they are.

3) Have fun figuring out the opposing partnership's conventions!

Yes, it'd be a whole different ball game. But would it be worse?

Discuss.

(Full disclosure: I played bridge competitively at university.)

(Update: seems k_sze was ahead of me.)

Yay another dillo user!

https://blog.sphere.chronosempire.org.uk/2013/11/26/dillo-a-...

Seconded.

I've beaten 4D. It does take substantially more concentration than the original though, which I can play and win mostly on autopilot by now...

Perhaps surprisingly, the AI of which you speak actually came first, and was an inspiration for this. https://blog.sphere.chronosempire.org.uk/2014/03/20/8402 has more details.