Ah I misworded when I typed the rule just now. Should be “an” rather than “the”.
To use distance, you would have to clarify that for each color, you can fix a single distance N, and then for each stone, there is some edge such that the distance from the stone to that edge is N.
It’s easier to divide the board into lines extending all the way to the edge and talk about all the stones being on the same set of extended lines.
2 Likes
Apologies for any frustration. 
I think I’ll see myself out now.
1 Like
Don’t worry! Like I said above, it’s absolutely a valid rule, and it makes perfect sense to me now. There was some confusion on how to write down the rule, but that’s not part of the game really, you had a consistent rule in your head during the whole game, that’s what matters 
What would have been bad is if someone had taken over the game halfway through, and started using a different definition of “second line” etc 
2 Likes
@RubyMineshaft I also think it’s a good rule but I think it is fair to say it was by no means easy to arrive at 
(Congrats to martin for seeing it too) I would also be happy if we can agree in the last two I shared, two of the stones really are on the edge of the board while the other two aren’t!
Imagine someone opening Tengen in a go game, and saying in response to it “Oh I see you like to play close to the edge of the board!” 
Yes, this would’ve really been awful!
That’s not the correct analogy, rather it should be something like 1-10 being a very high stone.
But anyways, let’s leave the confusing parts behind, I think we learned a lot of useful things from this game 
I really hope @RubyMineshaft doesn’t feel like it was a bad rule, it’s so hard to judge the difficulty in advance. We only learn these things by experience.
I would be happy to come up with the next rule, but I will be going to bed soon, so if someone else wants to start the next game before I wake up tomorrow, feel free!
Perhaps it might actually be good to have two people who know the rule, so that they can help each other judge the difficulty
4 Likes
I should probably just sit out of this thread/game.
I think I just have too many disagreements. Apologies @RubyMineshaft and @martin3141 for being unhappy about the rules.
3 Likes
Don’t worry about it. I’ll admit that my feelings are a little hurt, but that’s not your fault. I’m just overly sensitive sometimes.
3 Likes
I definitely don’t want to hurt people’s feelings over a game. I’m sorry for that.
1 Like
It’s really not because of you.
It’s more about the fact that I picked a rule that I thought would be simple and fun, but then it turned out to not be. So I spent 13 hours today just causing frustration all around.
2 Likes
I think it was a great rule. Conceptually simple, but happened to play out much harder. We can’t complain about it being convoluted, because it wasn’t. Brilliant rule. I think it worked well to stump us since its just a little bit different than how we typically think about distance (the closest edge, as opposed to any edge)
3 Likes
Frustration is part of the fun!! Great job! It would be disappointing if we got it too quickly.
Thank you for putting in so much effort to respond to questions and guesses all day.
3 Likes
Completely agreed on frustration being part of the fun.
For instance, I would 100% say that this last game was more successful than my first game (which was guessed almost immediately). What’s so interesting about these inductive games like Zendo is how they are a small playground for scientific research (and more generally trying to learn new things by making hypotheses and doing experiments). It’s often very hard, and that’s the point. We do hard things to get better at them.
4 Likes
Also, apart from me being grateful to everyone putting time into playing this silly game I started, I’m also thankful for the extra contributions you made to the board tool @RubyMineshaft 
6 Likes
It also preserved the rotational/reflectional symmetry while being conceptually simple which is great. I can imagine trying to pose simple to state rules but probably breaking a symmetry.
I think it’s frustrating for me that I was probably sharing ‘useful’ variations early on, but I don’t think I was ever going to be the person to understand the rule. I think this was me thinking of the other distance to the edge but I couldn’t make that work. By ‘useful’ I guess I mean retrospectively I could’ve probably added stones one at a time to these guys and then maybe arrived at some similar diagrams to Ruby’s hints. The hints are actually really good looking back at them too.
2 Likes
I think @RubyMineshaft gave an excellent puzzle. Part of the fun is indeed the challenge, if you feel it was impossible to guess, that’s not because the puzzle was flawed, but because your thinking about it was flawed.
I have a bit of experience making exercises for classes I taught, and if I learnt one thing with that, it’s that it is nearly impossible to predict how difficult an exercise / problem / puzzle is. Especially things that are required to be a little challenging can be completely impenetrable to some.
A good puzzle should be not immediately obvious, yet also not take too much thought to work out. But depending on which path you first take when trying to solve, it may be impossible to arrive to the right answer.
And especially with this game, none of us have played it before on a goban, so none of us have tested their challenges. We can only guess the difficulty level of the challenges.
5 Likes
I’ll do the next rule.
It shouldn’t be too difficult, but I cannot know yet if it will frustrate anybody.
3 Likes
Thanks guys. I feel a lot better now.
I’ll try this one:
2 Likes
I had a lot of fun playing around with that today! I want to look into it a bit more tomorrow and see if I can figure out the iOS copy to clipboard issue.
Guess: There are less than 7 stones
1 Like