Daniel Lepage on 24 Dec 2003 16:39:32 -0000


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [spoon-discuss] Junk



On Wednesday, December 24, 2003, at 03:03 AM, Glotmorf wrote:

Each square of the Grid has a Height. Each square can also either be
Open or Filled.

If a square of Height one becomes Empty, its height becomes zero.
If a square's Height is ever zero, it immediately becomes Open.

A Mound is a set of squares such that every square in the set is
Rectilinearly connected to every other square in the set, every square
in the set has Height greater than zero, and every square that's
rectilinearly connected to a square in the set but not in the set has
Height zero. [[i.e., a pile of junk squares surrounded by non-junk]]

If every square in a Mound is Open, that Mound Collapses - every square
in it becomes Filled and has its height decreased by one, and all
JunkBots in these squares are destroyed.

I have a problem with this part.

"Open" is not defined well.  You have "Open" as the state a
square takes on when its height becomes zero.  With this as
the sole possible definition, I gather that when a Filled
square becomes Open it means its height becomes zero.

"Filled" doesn't seem to be defined at all, except to be the
state of a square that's not Open.  Which means a square is
Filled regardless of its height, as further demonstrated by
the fact that all the starting non-zero-height squares,
ranging in height from 1 to 7, are declared Filled.

However, "If every square in a Mound is Open, that Mound Collapses - every square
in it becomes Filled and has its height decreased by one, and all
JunkBots in these squares are destroyed."  But if the squares
in the mound were all Open, that means their height was zero
at the time, so either (a) there is no mound, since there is
no set of contiguous non-zero-height squares, or (b) the
height of all the squares becomes -1.

Further, no provision seems to be made in the act of changing
an adjacent square from Filled to Open for varying height --
it costs the same energy to make a 7-height square Open as it
does a 1-height square.  Is this logical?  If so, why have
height at all?


I never define 'Open' as meaning 'has height zero'. If a square has no Junk in it, it must be open, but a square that is Open need not have height zero. Open simply means that it can be moved into - there might be seven units of Junk piled above it, but there's a tunnel at your level, so you can go in.

'Filled' then means 'Not Open' - there's Junk filling the ground level.

The Junk is very tightly packed - if you tunnel under a square, but the junk is still attached to other squares that aren't tunneled, it won't collapse. Even a single pillar of Junk can support an arbitrarily large Mound. But if every support is mined away, then the Mound's just floating there, one unit above everyone's height. Obviously Junk cannot do this, so the Mound collapses immediately, landing one unit below it.

Changing an adjacent square to Open just means you dug the junk out on the bottom level, so there's no penalty for doing it to a higher pile (except that somebody else might knock down one of the remaining supports and bury you).

--
Wonko

_______________________________________________
spoon-discuss mailing list
spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss