[extropy-chat] Petals around the rose: underdefined games

[Dan Clemmensen]

Spike wrote:

>>Dan Clemmensen
>>
>>Yeah. I formulated a hypothesis and got a correct answer on the first 
>>try. I continued to use the hypothesis for an additional 5 or 
>>six tries, and got a correct answer each time...
>>    
>>
>
>Dan, I speculate then that you are at least 40 yrs old[...]
>  
>
It's been awhile since I was 40. I'm 54. I was out of high school before 
I got my hands on a computer for the first time, and out of college 
before I played a computer game. The game was the original "Adventure." 
"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different." I met my 
wife-to-be at chess club in high school. For you younger extropians, 
"chess" was at that time a game played on an 8x8 grid that was 
instantiated as a physical board rather than on a computer screen, and 
using small three-dimensional figures instead graphical icons to 
maintain the game state.  :-)

Like Harvey, I thought the "petals around the rose" name was a 
sufficient clue. It helps that the commentary on the web page states 
that it problem was initially done with five dice.

For you younger extropians, "dice" (singular die) were used to generate 
quasi-random numbers prior to the availability of computers, with each 
die providing roughly equal chance of showing a number of "spots" 
between 1 and six on its upper face ... :-)