If the wait is boring

You've played the game "Find all the words using just the letters in the given word." E.g. STOP gives POTS, TO, SOP, etc, etc.

OK. On top of that, take that list and make the most compact crossword you can using all and only those words.

Teaching how to cheat

Musing on an irrelevant news bit reminded me of John Scarne the magician who the Army hired to teach soldiers how to spot cheating.

They figured that the risks of soldiers learning how to cheat were outweighed by the benefit of soldiers learning how to recognize cheating. This is something he did for the Navy.

To pour wisdom into young minds

Remember your senior year in high school? My memory is fuzzy – it was more than 50 years ago – but a few moments, and some of the people, still stand out. The yearbook has a photo of me reading a book in between classes, which probably helps illustrate why my memories of the rest of the place are faint.

Imagine yourself in one of those 50-minute classes. The now-year-old you would be bored silly by the material, and frantically trying to recall the names of the classmates around you.

Now imagine that 17-year-old you suddenly has the now-year-old you's mind and memories. You have 45 minutes – 5 to persuade the teacher to let you speak, and 40 to address your friends (aka captive audience). What do you say?

"Buy Microsoft" is pretty trivial advice. What do they need to hear? Can you warn them, inspire them, encourage them?

• They're young, and think what they've grown up with is permanent. "Almost all of you will live to see the USSR come to pieces without war." "The country of Poland was in a different place, within living memory!" I'm showing my age here.
• They have no idea yet how much their ideas and values are swayed by popular culture, and how much these will change along with the culture, without any thought on their part. Maybe a spot of Socratic dialog?
• They only think they know themselves and what they need in life. "We need to be needed." or "You want to be happy? Be grateful."
• Do any of them need an apology from you?
• Do they need to be warned that youth are ignorant, despite the popular call to "listen to the youth", and that the only change they'll make in the world is the little that will actually be in their scope?
• Do you explain your current religious or political faith?
• For that matter, are you a creature of current culture? If so, do you actually have any wisdom to impart?
• And, what would you promise the teacher to get permission to take over the class?

Would any of it do any good? Maybe just the apology...

It might be fun to guess how your friends might answer. Everybody at a table secretly writes what they would do, and then everybody guesses who wrote what.

Jazzing up the description

Use literary or allusive references to describe chess. Queen's Knight could be Lancelot (Mallory be the pawn?), Becket could be the King's Bishop (Eliot be the pawn?). Windsor could be the Queen's rook (Howard?). Ranks could be partridge, dove, hen -- or maybe that's not elegant enough.

I need to think about move descriptions; "Howard showed Mallory eternity?"

Passing time better left unpassed

Our eldest was given a Dr. Who Exploding Tardis jigsaw puzzle. Do I need to say that it is not complete yet? When I went to look up an illustration for the post, I changed my mind about the subject and started to rejoice that it wasn't "The Lines" or a solid color one.

I've heard of an abstract puzzle that included extra peices, of ones that didn't include edge peices--were there double-sided jigsaw puzzles with pictures on both sides? Yes.

I don't start jigsaw puzzles myself, but if one is already out it tends to exert a diabolical fascination...

FWIW, Prado Museum has a collection. If you want to put together the Garden of Earthly Delights...

Looney Tunes

AVI noted how the Looney Tunes used a variety of music in sophisticated ways, and Aggie commented that their humor was often aimed more at adults than children. I liked it, and I'm still fond of Rocky and Bullwinkle too.

Someone has probably done a thesis applying Myers-Briggs to cartoon characters and drawing deep conclusions from the frequency with which certain traits appear. Maybe certain personality traits just don't lend themselves to types of humor. Academic tool meets pop culture--and maybe says something interesting/useful?

Pop culture meets pop culture might be a bridge too far, for a thesis on D&D classifications of Looney Tune characters. Bugs Bunny as a Chaotic Good Bard?

Children's games

AVI has a post about children's games in England and the US.

My memory is a bit fuzzy, but at Ricks I remember boys playing soccer--with a ball if they had one, with an orange if they didn't--and I remember the jump-rope games as girls' games. I could be mistaken there, though. The jump-rope games were quite complicated, resembling "Chinese" jump rope. I'd bet the Liberian versions were independently developed.

Me? I tripped.

There were also some catch games, but I don't recall that they were especially different from "catch" anywhere else.

These days: You recognize some of these games as imports, and some as adaptations. FWIW, in the "hoop game" you guided the hoop--you don't "follow it" unless it got away from you. Or at least, that's what I saw. I remembered "na-foo" but didn't remember that it was "knock foot" or how it was played.

"Kickball" demanded a big soft ball (pitch is a roll, hit is a kick, otherwise just like softball), and so was more of an organized sport than a pick-up game.

The school had a basketball court too, which saw some action.

FWIW, Ricks has a policy that students are forbidden to bring cell phones or tablets onto campus. It's a boarding school.

"Ancient invention"

BBC has a story on an "ancient invention" that opened the world to games. (Spoiler: dice) It's an interesting story--read it. But a little note: mancala is a pure strategy game--at least the versions I learned were. (Bao looks hard)

See an online version

"Clerics"

I was introduced to D&D back in college. Some friends played regularly and invited us, and once circumstances converged to allow it.

There were a couple of things that didn't quite add up in the description. One was the notion that a section, once cleared of monsters, would stay cleared. That wasn't plausible at all--wait a while and it would fill up again, albeit with less dangerous critters (if they were more dangerous, they'd have pushed out the original occupants before you got there). That would include your victorious return journey--you'd have to fight your way back out too.

But it was the cleric that bothered me. True, these were based on pagan gods, which have consistency problems of their own. But as a rule a priest doesn't get to tell the gods what to do (although the Egyptian spell books might suggest otherwise); his god tells him what to do. And he might.

So, if a cleric can get a divine command at any time to leave and do something else, what would induce the party to invite him aboard? The team could get divine graces for a while, but they couldn't rely on him to stick around for the whole adventure.

My solution was the "geas-ite." If your cleric got a command to head somewhere, he had to light out right then, but he got divine protection along the shortest way out--and so would his companions so long as they didn't try side-trips. "In a jam and want to bail? Have the cleric check his mail." Would that be "d-mail" for "divine-mail" or "g-mail" for god-mail?"

I never got far enough to figure out which game-play mechanism would work with that concept--D&D play was far too time-consuming and I only lasted the one session. As a scheme for letting (most of) a team get a second try at a dungeon it seemed plausible, and it seemed more faithful to the nature of a cleric, but whether it would actually be playable I couldn't begin to guess. I haven't checked the rules in more than 40 years.

(The DM would, of course, repopulate the parts of the dungeon you'd already visited, thanks to the ecological principle I mentioned at the start.)

Dice game followup

In the post on a dice game, I didn't explain the meaning of the graphs.

A player has about a 50/50 chance of winning some points in her turn. That's in a good range--not too rare, not too often. But one attractive feature of the "losing turn" is that it isn't a one-and-done. There's a little tension: "I missed once, will I miss the second time too?" It makes the game a trifle slower, but the dramatic advantage should compensate for that. Clever.

Getting multiple points in a turn is common enough to make that something to hope for--and even getting a winning throw isn't so rare that the women wouldn't see it every few games. This also helps cultivate a little drama.

The more biased the chips are, the more likely early players are to win, but the effect isn't that dramatic for reasonable estimates of unfairness. If the chips are dramatically unfair, players will notice and quit using them. So it seems to be a pretty fair game.

The prize (some yard goods that she would give to a man in exchange for something of equal value) was something easily provided by the other women, something the man had to supply, and an exchange which emphasized the reciprocal obligations of men and women in the tribe. And--probably now and then an unmarried winner used it for signaling interest.

I'll work up some estimates for how many women can play the game before it gets too unfair. If there are 1000 women playing, the winner will appear in the first few hundred and the last ones will pretty much never get a turn. If you've only got 2 players, the odds are close to even for them both.

---

UPDATE:

Actually, this is a terrible game. Below see the table for the number of women playing and the relative odds of the last woman in the group to those of the first woman in the group. If you can randomly pick who goes first, who second, and so on, you're OK, but otherwise the first players have quite an advantage.

# players	win rate ratio of last to first
2	0.86
3	0.78
4	0.73
5	0.66
6	0.62
7	0.58
8	0.53

UPDATE:

The easiest way to fix this is to skip the "first past the post" rule, and allow points to keep accumulating. The first past woman with 10 or more points marks the final round, which continues until all are done; then the woman with the highest number of points wins--with tie-breaker rounds as needed. Of course, that's a different game then, but probably similar enough.

Women's dice game

Menominee women's dice game as seen in the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Six of the dice were thin circular disks; one was carved in the form of a turtle, and one represented a horse's head. They were formerly made of buffalo rib, but horse ribs were common in later times. One surface of each die was colored blue or sometimes red, and the other was left white. The bowl was held with both hands and the dice were shaken to the far side of the bowl. Then the bowl was given one flip and set on the floor and the score was counted, as follows:

• All of similar color except 2: 1 point
• All of similar color except 1: 3 points
• All of similar color except turtle: 5 points
• All of similar color except horse: 10 points
• All of similar color: 8 points
• All of similar color except turtle and horse: 10 points

The scoring varied according to each tribe, and each woman kept her own score using beans in front of her. Each woman shook until she missed twice and then passed the bowl in clockwise rotation. The first to score ten points won the game, and her prize-a piece of yard goods-was given to one of the men spectators, who in turn was obliged to reciprocate with a gift of equal value in the future.

OK, obviously the lady can score more than 10 points in a turn, though that won't happen often. If the chips (not really dice) were fair, the probability of red or white would be 0.5, but it might vary a bit. If they were fair, how much would a woman score in a turn--on the average? I made a stupid typo in my program, and I wanted to use the exercise to learn some python plotting I wasn't familiar with, so this took longer than it should have, but for your interest:

And if you want to know how things change if the chips aren't fair (systematically), that's here:

The award scheme is clever. The woman probably didn't need any "yard goods" herself--that was the sort of thing women made anyway. But she got to make a forced exchange with a man for something the men provided.

Virtual gaming

"Man Tells His Kids About The Good Old Days When You Played Your Own Video Games Instead Of Watching Other People Play Them On The Internet". The Bee, of course.

The number of video games I played as a youth was, of course, 0. And as a young adult--you could number them on your thumbs. It was an expensive hobby, and would clearly suck far too many quarters away from my second-hand book fund.

That particular non-predilection seems not to have been hereditary, though perhaps the gene was merely latent.

I get the appeal in playing the games, and if I spent the time to get involved, I would probably get involved.

And I suppose kibitzing is a grand old tradition, made more attractive by the greater emphasis on storyline in video games.

And who has 30 hours to devote to solving a new game? Or \$60 that doesn't have a better home?

Still.

Do you like to skip rocks?

This won't surprise many of us, but these kids have a great uncle. Watch the video.

No, it doesn't take the fun out of things to test them systematically.

Tangible

At Ricks by a graded road near our house lay a four foot pond. It bred mosquitoes, of course, but then tadpoles appeared, which seemed to take care of the larvae. The attraction of such a feature in the landscape should be obvious.

We tried slinging in dirt clods and rocks to see who could make the biggest splash. The tadpoles usually wriggled back to the pond, though not always—and that meant flies, which were annoying.

A couple of us tried to throw in a quite substantial quartz rock. Alas, it was so heavy that we couldn’t give it any speed, so it made more of a minor tsunami than a splash. It sank in the mud, leaving only a pyramid an inch above the water.

Next year the pond had filled in, and was now just a minor depression with a bit of quartz sticking out of the dirt.

I saw it again a few years ago. Re-grading had covered everything over, but I knew where it had been, and where the rock still was.

The quartz boulders in the field beyond that were so sharp edged when we used to jump on them were weathered and a little overgrown, and the trees and logs were long gone, but I still remembered where they had been.

Paths we explored, the field where we played 5-man football (It is hard to field two teams with only 5 players), the route the horse took around my grandfather’s house when he borrowed a placid horse so we could ride, where the persimmons that nobody really wanted grew—I can point to all these things.

I think I spent more time reading books than playing outdoors, and books are tangible too. For a while I was in another world, and then all evaporated when it ended. Almost all, there’s a residue in the imagination (what you immerse yourself in affects you). But I could still point to the book and say “I read that.”

Our Youngest Daughter dislikes e-books intensely, even when it is the only way to read some out-of-print work, saying that there is no substitute for the tangible thing in her hands. (Most of the articles and reports I deal with are never printed out, FWIW.)

I started down this path when I started wondering what difference it made for a generation to spend leisure with intangible amusements: video games in particular, though I suppose you could expand that into videos and ubiquitous music. I think the latter are more passive, though: books and the games require something from you to keep them going. It seems as though people don’t make their own music as much as they used to—maybe competing with the ubiquitous pros is too hard. I should try counting how many people seem to be singing in the car.

I have to speak only from observation about video games: I never got into them enough to get the dexterity to enjoy them, and at this stage of my life I don’t care to invest my limited time in them. But they seem especially ephemeral. Maybe you saved the game at some point, and maybe the scores are saved for a while, but close it down and where is it? Your life has fewer tangible markers for things you’ve done.

I wrote software for DAQ, hardware diagnostics, processing and filtering, and analysis—things people needed at the time. They were ephemeral too, but the fact of their service to the team remains. True, the result is a few journal articles, some of which nobody reads anymore. But the help was something real, though intangible. So maybe I should widen my question a bit, but … maybe next time.

Perhaps the best way to say it is that I feel more grounded, maybe a bit more real, when I can point to something and say “I made that,” or “I helped that person,” or “I was there.” Maybe that’s just me, and maybe very few people are as deeply into the ephemeral as advertised. But if not, I wonder how it changes you to live with fewer and fewer markers.

---

Then again, suppose your accomplishments themselves are focused on the ephemeral...

Volleyball

I saw some kids learning how to serve the volleyball yesterday, and as two tried to hit their balls over the net (one successfully), it occurred to me that the game is misnamed. There's no volley involved.

We could fix that. Two, or maybe three, serve at once, and your side loses a point if any hit the ground--or if you knock one out of bounds. Everybody has to be on their toes, including the scorer (did serve 1 hit the ground on your side before serve 3 went out of bounds?). The servers would, of course, try to overwhelm a position on the other side, so you'd need more players. And the strategy gets a bit more complex too--do you bat one in the air a bit longer so you can followup one ball that pulls the other team to one side with a ball to the other side?

Three balls might be too many, but..

Sometimes I write and then look things up. It turns out something like this is used a drill, except that each side serves at the same time instead of one side serving twice. Or thrice.

Games

There's a collaboration meeting next week, with some pre-meetings starting Saturday. Some of the people coming into town want to spend Friday playing board games, and others want to do rock or wall climbing. I suggested they combine the two. Imagine teams playing checkers on a climbing wall. Diagonal moves would be hard, but captures would be amusing.

War train

My first question was "Have any model train enthusiasts made a working model of this?" The answer seems to be Maybe, for some definition of working. I'm not aware of any 1mm guns, which is what you'd need for HO scale.

Why is Klondike solitaire so popular?

When I was in middle school I was trying to play Solitaire when Dad took the deck from me and showed me what the casinos did. You paid so many dollars for the deck, you got to play through just once, and they paid you a dollar for every exposed card. I looked at those numbers and figured I wanted no part of that game. I don't recall the initial cost anymore, and it doesn't matter for my life anyway.

I needed some practice with object-oriented aspects of python, so I set myself the task of writing that Klondike solitaire player I threatened. Some of what I found is about what you'd expect to see. I don't claim my algorithm is the best; one could be more strategic, especially as you learn what's in the deck. But it's an OK first approximation.

Yes, of course I wrote it so you can vary the number of ranks, number of piles, number of suits, and so on. Why bother otherwise?

I ran 10000 games with the different parameters. I kept 4 suits and 2 colors, but had 13 ranks and 7 piles (standard) and also 13 ranks with 6 piles, and 3 variants of 14 ranks (Tarot deck): 6, 7 and 8 piles. You expect that the more piles there are, the more cards are buried and the more will be left unplayed at the end of the game. And so it was.

With the usual game it looks like you win about 1 time in 20. (BTW, these are from random number generators, and are not exact.)

Type	Times you win	Time < 5 cards
Standard	485/10000	1681/10000
13ranks+6piles	792/10000	3210/10000
Tarot+6	516/10000	2702/10000
Tarot+7	247/10000	1319/10000
Tarot+8	136/10000	452/10000

That's the easy part. What's a bit harder is quantifying the "frustration factor": how close you feel you got to winning. I figure the oftener you feel like you almost won, the more likely you are to start a new game--provided you actually do win from time to time. And the game can't be too easy. I'm not sure how to quantify that either. But from the fact that the standard game uses 7 piles instead of 6, I suspect that 6 makes the game feel too easy.

Notice the spike near 0 for the standard game. Most of the time you lose by a significant amount, but you come close oftener. I list the numbers in the table above, but I show the plots below.

For what it's worth, even a game with 2 suits and 3 ranks (and 2 piles) doesn't always wind up with every card face up. And the game above goes through the deck repeatedly.