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1

General Discussion / Re: Codebreaker Logic Puzzle

« on: May 15, 2013, 02:26:08 pm »

Here's a question I have that isn't related to this puzzle in particular.

Has anyone designed a logic puzzle whose central deduction is a meta-deduction?  That is to say, a logic puzzle which is logically deducible only because you are foretold that is logically deducible, and therefore at a certain otherwise undecidable point, you are guided by such meta-knowledge.

I think there are Mystery Hunt logic puzzles that are kind of like this. Where for instance, the puzzle has a unique solution only because you know that a certain block of squares must be filled in such that it forms a valid Braille letter.

I'm not sure if using meta-deduction is even possible; the puzzle has to only have one valid solution, so at that undecidable point you could try all possibilities and see which ones lead to a dead end. Doing that is guaranteed to solve the puzzle, but never uses the meta-deduction.

2

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff

« on: May 14, 2013, 01:59:20 am »

Oh man!

I decided to practice the biggest skip in VVVVVV (it skips an entire level, but if you mess up the trick you have to restart the entire game.) Got it consistent enough to where I felt comfortable using it in a run, and got a 16:58 (almost a 2 minute improvement) with very sloppy execution on the rest of the run.

It feels a bit like cheating, since the level the glitch skips is by far my worst level in the game, but time is time.

3

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff

« on: May 12, 2013, 06:22:15 pm »

Ran into Jack Black and the rest of Tenacious D on the street yesterday.

What

4

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff

« on: May 12, 2013, 04:58:31 pm »

Given that my VVVVVV PB (18:50) is 6 minutes over the TAS time (12:33), that difference doesn't seem too bad.

I've lost interest in getting my time much lower. When I installed an update for my computer, it had the side effect of causing slowdown in around half of the levels. It doesn't affect the in-game timer, but it makes running those sections a lot more annoying.

5

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: May 10, 2013, 03:51:48 pm »

The whole "but you are the government" got me thinking; If you're the king, why can't you just take all the stuff you want?

Because you're the king of a small kingdom, with very little resources and land, and you want more. You spend the game by first taking over the means of production to earn money, then leverage that money by bribing important officials to do work for you. Eventually you either take over the empire, or get enough of the population on your side to make you the de-facto ruler.

Dominion: secretly the most political game in the world.

6

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: May 10, 2013, 06:43:34 am »

I think that's easy. Forged money is money you only spend once and hope to get away with.

Of course in real life real money can also only be spent once. But Dominion money is different from real money.

Ah, but you see, why do you trash the original? It's not as though you had to destroy the original to make a copy of it. All the card art shows is a paint brush. Why do you need to destroy the original to paint some money?

7

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: May 10, 2013, 04:32:42 am »

8

Dominion General Discussion / Re: First Posts

« on: May 02, 2013, 04:28:11 pm »

My first post was also in the Golem topic.

Depends on the board set-up. So far I've found it tends to shine when there are strong attacks.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110606-183830-e26bd92e.html

The above isn't a particularly interesting or good game, but it does show dedicated golem out well.

I think what made Golem work there was the lack of +Actions, not the strong attacks themselves. That game is also by far the meanest I have ever played. Getting Ghost Shipped, then Tortured almost every turn? Pretty bad.

9

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: House Rule: All Ruins Do The Same Thing

« on: May 01, 2013, 03:08:00 pm »

If it's the luck factor, then what if Ruins were

Choose one: do what this Ruin normally does, or gain a Ruins and return this card to the supply.

So now if you have an extra action, and the top Ruin looks better, you can switch it out. There's still a luck factor, but it's smaller.

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: I need to remove some cards from my games

« on: May 01, 2013, 01:05:11 am »

This Any thread's title becomes more inaccurate as it goes on.

FTFY

But what if I made a thread with the title "This thread's title will become more inaccurate as it goes on"? Then your claim would imply that thread's title would become inaccurate, which would make that thread's title more accurate.

11

Dominion General Discussion / Re: IGG, Fool's Gold and Thief

« on: April 30, 2013, 04:58:11 am »

Mixing Fool's Gold and IGG sounds like a bad idea, so it's pretty much one or the other.

Points for FG: Herbalist can give consistency and early +Buy, Council Room can massively increase odds of FG collision.

Points for IGG: Has more flexibility in buys, because it doesn't require buying as many FG as possible as quickly as possible. So, it can fit in Lighthouse, Thief, and Fortune Teller more easily.

Both strategies benefit from Thief: If Thief hits Fool's Gold, that's good no matter whether the player actually wants FG or not. If Thief hits IGG, the player can gain it to hand out a Curse without having to spend a $5 buy on it.

I think I'd actually try the Herbalist/Council Room/Fool's Gold route, ignoring IGG. The IGG -> Duchy pile out strategy doesn't sound quite as fast, and if you pile out Fool's Gold then you can exert a lot of pressure with quick Provinces (because the IGG player has to start picking up Duchies a lot sooner.)

12

Dominion Online / Re: How would automatch work anyway?

« on: April 28, 2013, 05:07:07 am »

How about, pool all cards of the participants for the game, to make sure you can always play with cards from sets you own/

For the matching process: define a matching factor to be |# sets owned - # sets in intersection of owned sets| This is 0 if the players own the same sets, 1 if the unshared sets is of size 1, 2 if there are two unshared sets, and so on.

First try to match people with matching factor 0, then matching factor 1, and so on. This gives a trade-off between accuracy of matching and speed, while leaving incentive to buy sets (because you will be matched more often with people who own those sets.) Also has the side effect of giving a preview of 1 or 2 sets at a time.

13

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff

« on: April 28, 2013, 02:08:55 am »

Yet more unapologetic speedrunning spam! New VVVVVV personal best.

http://imgur.com/z4R0IPg

I have no idea how I failed so much on "That's Why I Have To Kill You", while doing decently on the Gravitron, which is by far the room I usually die the most on.

14

General Discussion / Re: Google Code Jam

« on: April 27, 2013, 02:27:49 am »

Qualified for round 2, just. I failed one of the large test cases that I was sure I had gotten, so it was a lot closer than I was expecting.

I'm satisfied with this, since my goal was to at least tie what I did last year (qualify for round 2, then solve none of the problems.)

Edit: Okay wow, just realized why I got it wrong. Pro tip: reading the questions other people ask helps a lot.

15

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff

« on: April 23, 2013, 03:26:20 am »

Got it! New PB, 20:14. (http://imgur.com/FPIMsy6)

Wasn't expecting it, since the run felt so terrible. I was expecting something more like 25 minutes or so. Just 14 more seconds.

Is that your personal best for running a marathon?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=marathon+%2F+%281214+seconds%29

77.67 to 77.83 mph

Sounds right to me.

16

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff

« on: April 23, 2013, 02:39:57 am »

Got it! New PB, 20:14. (http://imgur.com/FPIMsy6)

Wasn't expecting it, since the run felt so terrible. I was expecting something more like 25 minutes or so. Just 14 more seconds.

17

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff

« on: April 20, 2013, 05:41:13 pm »

Casually speedrunning the game VVVVVV. After several attempts, managed to get 23:54 minutes + 59 deaths. Going to try to get some levels more consistent.

(For perspective, the current world record is 13:18, so I'm not doing that good.)

Ooh, you're a speedrunner? VVVVVV is a fun game for speedrunning, or at least it looks it.
I've been Speedrunning You Have to Win the Game recently, that's quite a fun indie game. My record is 5:23 (1 unintentional death), WR is 4:58. Once the WR gets optimised with the current route it should go down to about 4:50. I contributed to the current route, cut about 20 seconds off the old route.

Also a question. Does anyone know if there's a (sensible) way to make Powerpoint give a random number generator? It would be useful for a club I do AV at.

I wouldn't call myself a speedrunner. It's more that I decided to play through VVVVVV again, then decided to get the acheivements for dying as few times as possible. So I'm not using the fastest strategies, because those involve more risk and often use death abuse to save time.

First I'm going for getting < 50 deaths, then I'll try to get under 20 minutes, and then I'll probably be done with it.

Edit: Arrrrgghhhh. 21:55, 56 deaths. Definitely would have gotten under 50 deaths if I hadn't messed up so badly on the last couple of rooms, because the rest was amazingly good.

18

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff

« on: April 19, 2013, 02:58:26 am »

Casually speedrunning the game VVVVVV. After several attempts, managed to get 23:54 minutes + 59 deaths. Going to try to get some levels more consistent.

(For perspective, the current world record is 13:18, so I'm not doing that good.)

19

General Discussion / Re: Crappy Flash CCGs

« on: April 18, 2013, 02:32:15 am »

(Repeating what I said in the last topic on M:tG)

The balance on the power levels in M:tG has gotten a lot better. There's a lot fewer ridiculously bad cards now.

However, when it comes to types, there's been some pretty big changes. Creatures are now stronger, and spells are weaker. The rationale for this is that creatures are much more fragile than spells, because there are many more ways to kill a creature than to stop a spell. So, Wizards decided they didn't like the current status of creatures, and here we are. I have mixed feelings about this, since I feel there's a lot of creatures that are designed to be good even if they end up dying first turn. See Thragtusk, Wurmcoil Engine, Vengevine. (I haven't played with any cards past Innistrad.)

All in all, the balance is still pretty good, and my inner Timmy secretly likes that creatures are pretty awesome now.

Except for Thragtusk. That card is just bullshit.

20

Dominion Online / Re: Goko Redlines

« on: April 16, 2013, 04:44:23 am »

here's a quote from getsatisfaction:

according to that matchmaking is just around the the corner, or around the corner behind this corner,....

----------------------------------------------
I'm happy that people see that things are getting better. I was playing with the version that will be released on iOS yesterday and it's really nice.... has match-making, too.

We're getting there..... just been a more circuitous path than we anticipated.

Thanks again,
John Q.

What iOS version released yesterday?  Nothing I can find...

You're parsing it wrong.

Yesterday I was playing with the version that will be released on iOS and it's really nice.

21

Dominion Online / Re: Goko Redlines

« on: April 15, 2013, 09:54:15 pm »

Seriously, what is up with the goko ranking system? How does it work?

You earn points when you win and lose points when you lose. The problem is that the parameters for exactly how much you win/lose is dark magic, to the point where it's unclear how much effect Dominion luck can have on how your rating changes.

22

General Discussion / Re: Google Code Jam

« on: April 14, 2013, 03:13:55 pm »

So I am too late or can I still participate starting Round 1?

If you didn't do the Qualifying round, then you can't participate. However, you can look at the problems.

Thanks for mentioning this here! I participated back in 2004 but completely missed the signups and start for it ever since then. The format has gotten a lot better now that they are doing it independently from TopCoder. I was able to see this thread with about two hours to spare from the end of the qualification round, and it took me that long to try a practice problem, then do the first two qualification round problems (although had I seen the third I probably could have done that very quickly, I just didn't even read it).

Are the points cumulative? In other words am I starting with a disadvantage due to only attempting two of the problems in the qualification round?

Points aren't cumulative. Only your current round score matters.

23

Dominion Online / Re: Goko regrets

« on: April 12, 2013, 08:24:44 pm »

If I understood the rating system better and there was automatch, I would probably start playing on Goko more. But it would have to be with the log extension.

The interface is okay, but I feel it isn't quite as good. Once I got used to the Iso interface, it all felt very intuitive and streamlined. Whereas with the Goko interface, it took much longer for me to understand all of its quirks. There was only so much time for the interface to win me over, and it didn't make it.

I'm more focused on automatch than the interface though.

24

General Discussion / Google Code Jam

« on: April 12, 2013, 08:10:09 pm »

Just started today. Anybody here registered for it?

25

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Partnership Dominion

« on: April 10, 2013, 05:18:51 am »

See my sleep deprived ramblings at http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=412.msg5431#msg5431 and a mini-revival of the concept at http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=2659.msg42769#msg42769

It's worth a shot, and I haven't played it enough to make a good assessment on whether it's a good variant. In very abstract terms, it turns "snowball your own deck" into "snowball their deck so they can snowball your deck", and the result is that you have bigger delay between making a good deck and reaping the rewards from it.

If you don't have gainers, the game doesn't change too drastically. Strategy comes down to making sure your deck types are compatible. For instance, engine + pure BM is pretty bad, because the BM player can only buy one part a turn for the engine, which is usually not good enough to make the engine start.

If you have gainers, a lot of cards become pretty interesting. The balance becomes questionable though (for instance, it is theoretically possible to Swindler-pin).