I don't know how many besides me have been enjoying spectating the soon-to-be-concluded CSM Memorial.
Naturally, we acknowledge that we wish such a tournament had not taken place. But now that it HAS -
BOY! Some great slug-fests there. The news is that Maraca is unreachable in his position in first place. The only game remaining will not change anything. My congratulations to the eventual victor!
But even Maraca was not unscathed. I'm delighted to see the return to competition by Mr. Alan Hensel. While Alan and I may share the same birthday, unfortunately I can not claim to share his Twixt skills. He dealt Maraca his only loss. This was a fascinating game. I hope Alan, and perhaps Maraca might enlighten us a bit on the complexities over at 'the commentator'.
Bizniouf had a tournament to be proud of, gaining some nice scalps of players rated higher.
And even the last remaining game, between David and Kd Hoffmann has been a competitive match. I'm not going to name names, but I believe that if one has a look at the current position it will be clear that the game shall be ending soon.
Congratulations to all of you on playing such a fine (and long, grueling, two-round) tournament as a testimonial to our friend.
Of course I had to come out of Twixt retirement in memory of Chuck. He was friendly and competitive, and he was always trying to improve his Twixt skills, and it seems to me that more than a few players out there have the same spirit. A couple of them took me down in this tournament.
Thanks. I added also some comments and what white should play differently, usually I'm looking for the mistakes the loser made. Unfortunately without CSM most top players are mathematicians/IT people and they tend to think 'the same way'. I have the feeling players not coming from those fields have a different view on the game and we could learn much from them.
It has been a pleasure playing with all these very good players and I just cannot wait playing again ;-)
Although I can measure how far away I'm to them / you, I'm learning something each game I play and getting more and more Twixt spirit.
And I want to take the occasion to emphasize how nice is the Twixt community. Many people give advices with a lot of kindless and discussions are very interesting. I appreciate all this a lot... (and btw, I'm trying to do the same).
I thought game #1364875 between Maraca and Klaus Hussmanns interesting enough to make a graphical representation of the potential links for the #15 to the #22 moves in addition to Maraca's explanation on Twixt commentator.
Here it is for 15.Q9 move :
Legend :
- Solid lines = potential link which cannot be broken with only one move
Wow, really nice graphics. Interestingly, this is almost the same to what I thought is the best approach to write a strong bot (but never realized it). If you could evaluate how strong some pegs/groups connect and represent the board as in your graphics, combinated with the rules you gave above and some weights, that would be it. You thought about making a bot or is this the way you think when playing games?
Well, since I'm an IT engineer, as you know, the way I think is never very far away from the way I think a bot could do ;-)
More seriously, this is the result of my analysis. I haven't really consciently thought to a game this way so far. Maybe it can help, but actually, I am working at trying to play in a more intuitive way so that all this can be "integrated" in my mind and I can just "feel it" (event if I can check it).
Today I'm also taking too much time to check if some links are breakable or "one move unbreakable". But I think this is matter of experience.
I agree that a bot could / should use such an approach. However I'm not sure it can apply to the beginning of a game which I think is the more important. I'm not sure you need weights neither. But I think a bot would also need patterns to be able not to try everything.
Little Golem