Phutball players?

Are there any Phutball fans here? I've had one of my bots playing on vying.org for a while, but there isn't too much action there nowadays. I took the engine and hooked it up to a system I wrote to play games through email. Let me know (send me a private message with your email address) if you want to try a game against it.

Thought I'd bump this thread. The bot is still running if you want to face it. You can also play against another person if you want to (but I would need the email addresses of both players).

It actually sounds like a pretty ccool game.

Anything invented/discovered by John Horton Conway is cool, except his discoveries on hot games.

Game of life is pretty cool (although it doesn't seem like a game to me)

So, i was having breakfast with Conway one morning a few years back... [name drop: *thud*]

and he explained his proof of why 91 is the smallest number that looks prime, but isn't.

I could see why the moment he made the claim (the proof was obvious), and 91 has been one of my favourite go-to numbers ever since. :)

Proof sketch:

All even numbers other than 2 are obviously not prime.

All multiples of 3 are obvious, by summing the digits repeatedly.

All multiples of 5 are obvious, since we happen to live in a base-10 culture.

Multiples of 7 are not so obvious.

Multiples of 9 are multiples of 3, and casting out 9s makes it obvious.

There are numerical tricks for multiples of 11, resulting from it being the prime (b+1) of base 10. (There are lots of patterns in these numbers which you can see just by looking at them).

For 13, not so much. (Like 7, there are no tell-tale residues in the products).

Thus, 7 * 13 = 91 is the smallest number that looks prime, but isn't. -JHC.

During his visit, Conway also took great delight in thrashing us in 3x3 Dots and Boxes (to demonstrate that it is a remarkably non-trivial "kids game"). Naturally he was familiar with Elwyn's theories on the game, and he decided to commit the entire game tree to memory, as yet another way to show off in public.

I also recall him doing card tricks at a cocktail party for the combinatorial game theory conference at MSRI. Definitely a fun guy to have around. :)

thrashing people in 3x3 dots and boxes handly seems that impressive :p I think a winning strategy is pretty each to learn and even to teach someone who never played.

Well, i don't play the game, so i can't say for sure, but it appears to be highly non-trivial -- at least to the extent that a good player can beat a casual player nearly 100% of the time as as either the first or second player.

The point is that strategically it is in a completely different world than Tic-Tac-Toe, even though it seems to be of a similar scope.

I guess the conventional terminology is to count the boxes, not the points, so i'm actually talking about the 2x2 game (nine points, four boxes). It has 2^18 = 262144 states before accounting for symmetry (8-fold, or 16-fold if one is cleverer).

Hi, I used to play phutball on vying as HugoBot. It's a shame phutball isn't on little golem.