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

["Craig" <ragnarok@xxxxxxxxx>]

>>>> 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.

That is in fact quite different from genuine historical rules; my intent was
to make it possible for new players to join the game rather than forcing
everyone to decide at the beginning of the game whether they would play or
not. There is a thorough discussion of historical Tafl rules at
http://user.tninet.se/%7Ejgd996c/hnefatafl/hnefatafl.html; there is
absolutely no reason to believe that the game traditionally provided a means
of recovering pieces. Another reason why the rules are so different is that
all players are given an equal footing, whereas the original rulesets had
two players in rather different situations with different goals.

I'm leaning toward the suggestion above of only giving each player one
Hnefi, and removing em from the game once it escapes.

>>>> 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.

Quite. I'm not at all sure how to do a visual representation of more than
three dimensions. Eleven would be mind-boggling, even if we could somehow
understand it.

 -- Teucer

"Be vewwy vewwy quiet. We're getting mawwied."
 -clsn

ragnarok@xxxxxxxxx
teucer@xxxxxxxxxx


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