Daniel Lepage on 31 Dec 2003 16:07:34 -0000


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Re: [spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] Tafl anyone?



On Dec 30, 2003, at 10:53 PM, Zarpint Jeremy Cook wrote:

E. Ko
Two states of the board are considered "equivalent" if the only
difference
between them is that, at any number of given positions, a Piece
belonging to
one player is replaced by a Piece belonging to another, and those two
players are allied in either state. Only the positions of pieces on the board are considered when checking for equivalence; differences in the
state
of alliances or in who made the most recent move are not considered.

A player may not make a move if that move would change the board
position so
that it is equivalent to a previous board position.

[[Tafl does not traditionally have a Ko rule, but it is being
incorporated
into Political Tafl because the game does not automatically end when a
Hnefi
escapes.]]

Ko works in Go because the number of stones is in general rising. This
is not true of Tafl, and I don't think anyone wants to be responsible
for comparing each move to all previous board states.

Chess has a similar "repeated position" rule. Actually, in chess it's a draw, but here there is no way of ending the game (if people keep playing) until it grinds to a halt from any move being a ko violation--which will take at least
2^169 moves.
I actually think a Ko rule is needed here, or someone could
move A, then eir opponent B, then A^-1, then B^-1, ad nauseum.
Some other way of ending the game would be nice--e.g., permit each player to only place one Hnefi, and once eir Hnefi escapes, e retires from the game.

IIRC, the Chess repeated position rule only applies to a few preceding turns. Also, in chess, the number of pieces tends to go down as the game progresses, with no way of regaining old pieces, so at the very most you need to consider every state the board's been in since the most recent capture. Then also there's the fact that pawns can only move foward, so all board states after a pawn move or after a capture are guaranteed to be different from all states before then.

In Tafl, as it is described here, it is perfectly conceivable that once a player's pieces have been largely captured, e can repurchase eir entire army back. Thus, after any given move, every previous state of the board must be considered, since from every state it is possible to progress to every other state.

Political Go, IIRC, has a bit here about how people get points for
having Go points... is it your intent to make Tafl completely
independent from the main B Nomic Scores? In that case, you can do this
as a society.

I don't really like the idea of having a million societies with different games each. It could just be another Attribute that non-Tafl players could ignore.

I quite like the idea of having dozens of subgame societies; if each were properly self-contained, then all the nonplayers would ever need to know is when points were given or taken by the society.

A visual representation of the board is strictly optional; the
following
comment is a perfectly valid expression of the same move as above.

[[
I move my pawn from (5,13) to (10,13).

Teucer               0 points   Allies: Someone Else
Hnefi: (5,12) Pawns: (10,13) (6,7)

Rob the Voting Fish  0 points   Allies: none
Hnefi: (2,4) Pawns: (3,8) (10,8) (8,5) (11,3)

Someone Else         0 points   Allies: Teucer
Hnefi: (5,2) Pawns: (8,9) (7,5) (6,4)
]]


Eris! Do we really want these kind of posts? I can't tell anything from the
numbers unless I draw the grid myself, personally.
And we don't have a Ministry whose job it is to display this otherwise.

I believe the reason for that sort of post is because the visual method becomes difficult if we add eight more dimensions.

Do we want this to be a r1633 Environment?

I'd think so.


--
Wonko
Award Wonko a Win.
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