simont | (no subject)

I'm running out of things to do.

Went into town at lunchtime on Friday and bought "Ash: A Secret History", which seemed like a nice thick book which should have kept me occupied for some days. By the time I went round to the Gallery on Sunday, despite having also done all sorts of intensive geekery during the weekend, I'd finished it. Sometimes I wish I didn't read quite so fast.

Also my two-minute break activity of choice, when I'm sitting at a computer and don't immediately have the energy to do some work, has been to play Gnome Iagno (Othello/Reversi clone). Today I managed to defeat it by 51 pieces to 1 (with 12 squares left unoccupied on the board and no further moves available to either player, which was sort of fun) and then in a subsequent game I wiped all its pieces out totally. I think this is as good as I'm realistically going to get playing against this thing, so I either need a better computer opponent or a new game of some sort.

Honestly. If this goes on, I might actually have to find something productive to do...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Iagno has an equivalent to Fool's Mate - all your opponent's stones gone with fewer than three rows filled. Quite impressive the first time you pull it off, then annoying for several days while you work out how on earth you did it.

I think a new game sounds like a better use of your time - I'm not sure it has much in the way of deep strategic possibilites.

The thing is, Othello does have some deep strategy. I basically play heuristically, with a mental database of Dumb Mistakes To Avoid When Playing On An Edge Because They Would Let The Opponent Into The Corner; this works most of the time against Iagno, but just occasionally I find myself in a position where it's carefully arranged that none of the places I'd like to occupy for positional purposes can actually be played in because there's nothing I'd capture by going there, and then I have to move somewhere stupid and hand it the game. I'd like to play against a better computer strategist which could deliberately play for that sort of thing instead of achieving it once in a while by dumb luck; but I don't really feel up to trying to encode my own strategy into a computer program, and even if I did it would precisely not have the property I'd be looking for.

I wonder what to play next, then. GNU Go is quite a lot better than I am, but it doesn't really work as a two-minute break in the middle of coding - it's more of a serious twenty-minute effort. And chess has never been my game...

It has strategy, certainly, but I remain unconvinced that it is at all deep in the sense that chess or go are. I'll concede that it's deeper than very shallow games. I'm willing to be convinced, mind, if you know stuff about it that I don't.

This is a book about the history of ash? As in Pottasium-rich remanants of wood fires? Bizarre. It sounds like a good subject for a book, though.

*giggle*

No, it's a fantasy novel about a woman who goes by the name Ash for reasons explained in the first chapter. Nice thought though :-)

Let me prod you in the direction of the Baen Free Library, which ought to provide you with a good month's feeding...