simont | (no subject)

Oh, and I invented a silly game last night in the pub.

rmc28 was describing a card game to me called ‘Nuclear War’, which sounded like a reasonably complex affair involving warhead cards, propaganda cards and all sorts of rules. It crossed my mind that surely nuclear war would be better modelled by a very simple Hofstadterian non-game, along roughly these lines:

The first player to shout ‘BANG!’ is the winner, unless the other player also shouts ‘BANG!’ within four minutes, in which case both players lose.

I didn't think I was serious about this. But later on, it occurred to me that if you cut the four-minute warning time down to about two seconds (after all, in this simulation the players aren't separated by half the world!), it might actually become a halfway plausible game to be played between (for example) small children on a long car journey. They wouldn't be playing it to the exclusion of all else, of course; they'd be conversing, squabbling, staring out of the window, asking ‘are we nearly there yet’ and all the other things small children do on long car journeys; but every so often one of them would shout ‘BANG!’, and if the other one didn't remember and react quite quickly enough, they'd score a point. Experiments in the pub suggest that it's actually quite tricky to realise why someone is shouting ‘BANG!’ at you fast enough to respond in kind within two seconds, especially after a couple of pints.

(It's an important feature of the game that a draw involves both players losing, so that it's undesirable to be the first to attack unless you think you have a reasonable chance of getting away with it. Without this feature, your best strategy would be to attack first, and to do so constantly, on the basis that that way you could never lose and just might win.)

Of course, you'd build up a reflex reaction fairly fast and then the game would get boring due to mutual assured destruction; so it wouldn't stay interesting for too long. But I was rather amused to find that it was actually a more challenging game than I'd initially thought when I jokingly proposed it :-)