Right. Interesting small patterns can be found using clever search algorithms. There's also the approach of running trillions of random 'soups' and scanning the results for interesting patterns. These small patterns are then pieced together to build the larger structures.
One thing this doesn't take into account (and the paper acknowledges this) is that the characters are assigned by picking cards from a deck. So the two players cannot have the same character.
Taking this into account would make the game much more complicated, because it can introduce an element of bluff.
For a simple example, imagine that there are only 5 characters. On your first turn you know the opponent doesn't have the same card as you, so you've got 4 options remaining. You'd like to ask a question that splits them into 2+2, but if you do this then the card you're holding will make one of the groups into a 3. Your opponent will know that your card is one of the 3, so you've effectively given them a head start. Instead you might sometimes want to split the options 3+2 with your card in the 2, as a bluff.
How often you want to do this must be described by some Nash equilibrium probabilities. It would be interesting to set up a linear programming solver to find these exactly, but so far I haven't had time to set this up. I don't know if it would be practical to solve the full version of the game with 24 characters.
Doesn’t that strategy only work in games like Clue, where everyone is trying to uncover the same hidden character?
In Guess Who, you’re identifying your opponent’s character, not a shared one, so any misdirection only hurts you … because it doesn’t generate extra signal for your opponent, so there’s no strategic benefit to misleading them.
The problem is when you bisect an odd sized group. You necessarily have to make one half larger than the other. So you're not trying to misdirect, you're trying to avoid creating a signal. But to do this you have to sometimes put your character in the smaller half, which trades off against your other goal of shrinking the pool as fast as possible.
Fans of Celtic knots might also like the daily game Celtix (https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/celtix/) where the objective is to separate a Celtic knot into five coloured strands.
The issue that spawned scalping and Ticketmaster is that musicians want to sell tickets under their market value. There's no analogous issue with airline pricing.
Worse still, they want to sell it below market value, but they want to be paid as if they were selling tickets at market value.
I remember finding some story about a contract for Ke$ha or Kathy Perry or some other pop-concoction of the previous decade getting leaked (*) , and one of the ways in which the artist got paid was trough a percentage of the tickets to distribute trough unofficial resale channels.
The issue that spawned Ticketmaster is that as a class artists are greedy, but they want to pretend they aren't. Being hated is a vital part of that company's business model.
(*) I think it must have been Ke$ha, as that one was involved in some financial dispute, but I can't find the story right now.
> The issue that spawned Ticketmaster is that as a class artists are greedy, but they want to pretend they aren't. Being hated is a vital part of that company's business model.
The issue is that scalpers can buy a significant portion of tickets at initial pricing and artificially drive up demand when the event says they're "sold out". Plus, many events like to set low initial prices to try to get money flowing in earlier, and raise prices closer to the day of the event, which makes them a potential "investment" for people who have no plans to attend.
The demand is the demand. TM should just set the initial price higher. This will discourage scalpers because their return is lower and their risk is higher. Fans will get to see the concert if they are willing to pay. If they aren't, then the price is too high, or the tickets will go to other fans who value them more.
But many concertgoers buy their tickets early specifically to get the discount. The discount over later pricing is a valid marketing tactic. Airlines also raise seat prices closer to the day of the flight to encourage people to buy earlier ahead of time.
If Ticketmaster enjoys such market dominance, they become responsible to prevent widespread misuse of their own platform, lest they become negligent. They are owned by livenation which is a public company.
The thing was it was local promoters + local sales (aka criminals) who would get tickets from management (yes thats the artists management) and kick the money back to the artist if they were lucky (if not the management kept it).
Now TM owns the venue, they are the promotor, they are the manager(to an extent) and have full control of the tickets, and the secondary market. The artist is now 100 percent in on the action making fans buy a fan club membership then get "face value" tickets at presale only with expensive meet and greet packages that range from a few hundred bucks to a 1000. An artist can tack on 50k to several 100k doing this at every date/venue.
As for TM's uncharges, most of that is because the artist either demands they do it (my prices are reasonable) making TM the scape goat, or they want a sum that is the total of the door and TM needs to cover venue costs and make profit so that just gets baked in as a "fee".
Just to put a fine point on this. In the old model promoters, venues all of those entities being separate and charging a markup made sense. When TM consolidated they didnt change the markup they just kept the margin...
By the reasoning of "Now TM owns the venue, they are the promotor, they are the manager(to an extent) and have full control of the tickets, and the secondary market." I would think the artist is 100% at the mercy of TM rather than in on the game. With that kind of control, why would they share with the artist?
> With that kind of control, why would they share with the artist?
Its in both parties benefit to find a mutually lucrative deal. More so when the customer is not that bright and motivated by "passion" and "fan culture". That same sort of passion (about music) leads to all parties underpaying a lot of staff (people want to be in the industry for some reason). Tech has its own version of this, see game development for over worked and under paid talent who does the job out of "passion".
"Influencers" selling burgers, backpacks, sports drinks and screw drivers is no different than concert t-shirts, posters, coffins and condoms. An artist is more than just the songs they sing. It's the film / TV that work shows up in. It's the other products artists can sell (a lot of this is other peoples art but...) and the things they can promote. They can exist without TM but the same cant be said in the other direction.
And some times the artist do get screwed. When your management and TM/LN folks have a relationship that dates back to Bill Graham Presents there is likely a back side deal that gives the management an extra kick.
I feel like there's always going to be a surplus in artists. I think it would require something like a union of artists to have any kind of leverage in that regard.
Maybe something like ASCAP or BMI?
What other services, other than musicians operating in a monopoly environment, deserve criticism for under pricing their services? The problem is a market failure, but the musicians didn't cause it.
Only recently I realized the fact of musicians purposefully selling tickets much below of what people would actually pay. Never occurred to me, had to hear it in an podcast/interview.
I wonder how many simple facts of life like that one remain hidden right under my nose.
I had the opposite problem at my last company. When you hover over a link Apple's Mail app opens a preview of the page. So if you try to see the URL then you automatically visit the link and get sent for more training.
I learnt that all those emails were sent through some relay. I blacklisted the relay. And then, some real training email notifications were sent through the same relay. But that relay is used for phising, so I just refuse to open the training email. Win-win.
I've tried KDE in Debian and NixOS, and the experience is exactly the same. In many ways the choice of distro is much less impactful than the choice of desktop environment.
The difference is that Monty knows which of the doors the car is behind and deliberately avoids it, thereby giving away information about where the car is.
Whereas in Minesweeper we've just blindly stumbled across a situation where we have to guess.
It would be like if every show Monty always revealed a random door. Sometimes he would reveal the car and the game would end immediately. In the cases when he didn't reveal the car it really would be 50/50 between the remaining two doors.
Yes, (original author here) in fact all the cells outside this region have an even better safety probability of 80.1%. I think the best move might be to start fresh in a new corner.
Hmm, but how likely are clicks on random squares to reveal more safe clicks? Seems likely that even if you hit a safe square you might still not have any safe moves. The goal ought to be to create more safe moves for the next turn, to reduce your chance of dying over the whole game, not just in the current turn. I wonder what that analysis would look like.
In the given example, if you click two squares down from the 3 in the 2-3-4 at the bottom, if you get a 3 it may reveal a 3 that will open up all the spaces around it. Which in the process may reveal what kind of 4 it is.
If you click on the square three to the right of the top 1, if that shows a 1, then a lot of surrounding squares can be revealed and again you may "walk up" to a more definitive mapping of the bombs.
I'm not even sure those are the optimal examples, but when I minesweeper it was for speed.
The real advantage, especially at this stage of the puzzle, is that those squares might quickly lead to another big field to be revealed.
