_"Symple actually seems like a quite cool game (after watching just the example games) - I would love to see it here. However, I must disagree that it is a hard game because the searchspace is big. In sorting you also have n! size searchspace on n numbers but the problem is pretty easy.
Anyway, we may have gone overboard in this thread that is supposedly about chinese chess - maybe we start a new thread about Symple or simply about game wishes on LG?"_
I'll gladly leave the searchspace to be estimated/classified by programmers. Supporting your arguments is the fact that Marcel Vlastuin's Symplebot appears to play a decent game. I started playing more or less clueless clueless, but I'm learning, and I won one and lost one. Of course the program is improving too, and it calculates for quite some time (hours rather than minutes to judge from its move rate). Just to see how we do, here's a new set:
Well, im not saying it is easy for a bot to play Symple, I am just saying that big number of different moves doesn't make a game hard.
Concider this game:
Player one writes 100 symbols in a row (lowercase or uppercase letters or numbers). If he wrote 100 A's he wins, otherwise he loses. It is pretty easy to win for P1 even though ge has 62^100 different possible moves.
"t is likely quite a bit harder than Havannah due to the large amount of moves. It's not quite clear yet how to represent multi-moves like this. Even still, it is quite doable to make the programs only consider a smaller subset of the moves. The true branching factor is something like the factorial of the number of groups, but if each can be considered independently, that makes it much smaller. Even if neighbouring pairs in a Voronoi diagram need to be considered, that's still less than N2, which is big but not absurdly huge. Go uses quite a few learned patterns to suggest good moves, as most of them are bad at any given time. There isn't a large set of games to learn from here, but I'd guess that patterns will work similarly well in Symple."
With a good computer support for Symple (auto counting of the number of groups, and the current result value) I would be willing to try it (for small board sizes, say 11x11). The advantage of Symple is that the current result can be calculated at all times. No guessing is needed like in Go. In Go one has to close the territories to be sure about the outcome. On the other hand Symple is not at all user friendly for over the table play. It is a computer era game :)
I agree very much. Scorekeeping is quite imporant (as supported on the nice applet on mindsports) in symple. Seems like it may take up an unreasonable amount of the time when played on a board.
I agree, yet playing Symple and Sygo over the board is possible by using Go stones with a small dot on one side. Counting should not be all that complicated if a player keeps count of the stones he played - groups are an easy count.
Ah, it indeed would be a fun game to play here on LG. In general it is just always fun when new games are implemented here. When do you think we will see the next one?
Little Golem