Site Stats & Seega Examples
First, yesterday I noticed several unusual user locations for this blog ... one from Oslo - Norway, and one from somewhere in Venezuela. And today there were hits from China and Brazil.
Normally my recent user map shows various hits from all over the US but clustering in the Ohio/NE area, around STL and northern CA. All of which make sense either by location or by ISP (its funny to see where some ISPs drop off their data. Some of the guys reading for WPAFB's traffic is coming out of NY (or the domain is at least registered there)).
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Chaz, hopefully this will help with the Seega captures:
- Empty standard board, 5x5, with the "safe" center square highlighted
- A possible full board (12 pieces each, middle square is always left empty to start)
- If blue moves down, (as the arrow suggests) both red would be captured
- If blue moves down,he is still safe since he moved between the two red
- If blue moves up, nothing happens b/c there is a gap to the left before the next blue. if he moves left then he captures all three reds
- if blue moves up, he captures the 2 outside reds. The center red is on the safe square and can not be captured, however he can be part of a string that gets captured.
3 comments:
Question about the setup. As you add pieces to the board, can you capture your opponent's pieces? If not, it looks like the only beginning move you can make is to move a piece into the center square, which wouldn't be possible if your opponent took all center adjacent squares.
During the "setup" phase, nothing gets captured. Its just for getting the pieces on the board. There probably is/should be some strategy to where you place your pieces but we have pretty much just been doing it randomly.
Yes the first move is always into the center, but you can move off it again later. And yes if one person has all of the adjacent squares, they are forced to go first.
I just started thinking about your game. Without a board and opponent I am only imagining what might happen in general. Some observations off the top of my head (1) you can't capture any pieces w/o being adjacent to them, so being off in space by yourself is no threat. this means that the pieces doing any attacking are coming close to the opponents pieces and vice versa. Imagine an infinite board... your pieces off by themselves are out of play, neither being captured nor helping to capture. Conclude: as the game progresses the single block of pieces will evolve into one or more clouds. (2) you can't capture anything without moving to both ends of a string of opponent pieces, i.e. you need a partner piece to make the attack serious, so you must think of potential attacking pairs. Conclude: it's no good to be on just one side of a cloud . . you need to have pieces on opposing sides of the cloud to threaten. Conclude2: pieces will be safer on the edges of the cloud. in the beginning that means on the edge of the board, but when there are few pieces this means being on the edge of the remaining clouds (3) the only safe spot is the center sqaure, so once someone moves there, why move off it unless you capture and can come back to it. it will become like the edge of the cloud pieces . . one end of an attacking pair, but the only one not on the edge of a cloud. Conclude: the pieces not on the edge of the cloud and not on the safe center are the most vulnerable and also the most willing to move, so most of the action will be around these ones moving, but attacker can suddenly become the attacked. Conclude2: the edge and safe center pieces are reluctant to move so I call them sticky. The other pieces are often chasing or running so I call them fluid. The motion of the fluid pieces will be more obvious and the surprise attack moves will more likely come from the occasional move of a sticky piece. (4) linear consecutive arrangement of your pieces are vulnerable to multi-piece captures so to be avoided . .your opponent will do the same. Conclude: there will be some tendency toward alternating pieces (4) the board is finite so you can constrain your opponent's moves . chase him around or corner him against the board boundaries or against one or more sticky pieces
Question: in your example of the 3 way capture, following the move of one piece, the other 3 'end' pieces were already there. This seems to say that at the end of a move of a single piece, if any pieces are surrounded they are captured. But I think it's necessary to clarify. Capture is not merely being bracketed. Capture is being bracketed where one of the end pieces was just put there. Otherwise the initial set-up starts with some of the pieces mutually captured. In fact, with the tendency to avoid consecutive strings, why not do this during non-random setup, so the starting point might often by totally alternating and without this clarification, almost all the pieces would start out already mutually captured. I don't want a universe where everyone starts out a prisoner !
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