Subject: ackanomic Digest V4 #177
From: [email-masked]
To: ackanomic digest users <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Jul 1999 00:00:04 -400 (EDT)

ackanomic Digest	Sunday, July 04 1999	Volume: 04  Issue: 177

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From: Duncan Richer <[email-masked]>
Subject: Acka: Vacka
Date: Sun, 04 Jul 1999 00:12:55 -0400 (EDT)

I go on Vacation, expected Date of Return August 1st
(I should be back by Monday 26th July, but, hey, no biggie).

Yours,
Slakko

-- 
Duncan C. Richer aka Slakko the Lost Warner Brother | Queens' College
http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~dcr24/    Ackanomic     | U. of Cambridge
                    Web-Harfer, Map-Harfer, Justice | 2nd Year PhD(PMa)

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Subject: Acka: Thesis
From: Joseph DeVincentis <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Jul 1999 12:10:14 -0400 (EDT)

I submit the following text as a Thesis in the major of Treasure Hunting,
paying the SHF to do so.

Why There Are No More Interesting Treasure Hunts
by /dev/joe

At one time, there were quite a few interesting treasure hunts in
Ackanomic.  In the last year, though, it seems people have needed
significant prodding to even attempt to solve treasure hunts.
The primary reason this is so is that most of the interesting ideas
for treasure hunts have already been done.

Many of the early treasures in Ackanomic asked treasure hunters
to perform relatively simple, well-defined tasks.  For instance,
Treasure 101 [1] asked players to win three different sub-games,
each of which had three or more players.  At the time, the sub-game
system was rather new (this was October 1996) and this was probably
intended to prod the system along, both to encourage players to play
games and to encourage the creation of more games playable by three
or more players.  It's not clear how well it accomplished this
purpose; it was quite some time before anybody accomplished this feat,
despite the introduction of several new games and quite a few instances
of the games being played.  However, many of the multi-player games
take months to play, and as it can get confusing to have multiple
instances of the same game in progress, only in a couple instances
(Eleusis, Game of Pure Skill) have there been two instances of the
same multi-player game in progress at once; three is unheard of. [2]
Since this time, the winning-subgames mechanic has been used elsewhere
with the rules [3] and as part of another treasure [4] but the idea
of making another treasure with just this condition seems passe.

Treasure 102 asked players to submit proposals to define new ways of
winning Ackanomic.  This was an overwhelmingly successful treasure,
in that players continued doing so long after the treasure was found,
perhaps to the extent of creating too many ways to win.

Treasure 103 was the first of a long line of encoded treasures.
If anything has been overdone in treasures in Ackanomic, encodings have.
This first encoding was a relatively tricky one, a book code using
proposal numbers and word offsets from either end of the proposal,
which also shifted all the proposal numbers by 300 to hide the fact that
they were proposal numbers.  This took a good three months to be found.
Treasure 111 (snowgod's treasure which gave the word "Hubert" its
Ackanomic meaning) sparked the series of (mostly much easier) encoded
treasures.  This treasure's map was simply presented as hexadecimal
ASCII, and several players figured it out quickly.  Treasure 112 was
encoded by obfuscation; what appeared to be a uuencoded file was actually
a text message scattered throughout the "encoded" data.  Treasures 113, 114,
118, 121, 124, 127, 129, 132, 133, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 147, 151,
and 155 were other encodings.  In general, these were either found very
quickly (when they were variations or combinations of "standard" encodings),
or tended to stay buried for a very long time.  Treasures 121, 129, 133, 135,
and 147 have apparently never been decoded, though 129 and 133 were found
due to a rule which allowed for an alternate method of finding treasures
which have been without map custodians for a long time.  Treasures 114, 139,
and 141 took three to five weeks to decode, 132 took about two months, 118
took four months, and 155 took over a year.  The others in the list above
were found within a day or two of being buried.  In recent times, there is
still the occasional treasure which consists of nothing but an encoded
message, but usually now codes are combined with other activities; codes
that have been done before are generally too easy to decode, and ones that
haven't are generally too difficult.

Treasures 105 and 106 continued the idea in treasures 101 and 102,
by asking players to perform various normal game actions (normal,
like burying treasure, winning duels, etc., as opposed to solving a
puzzle or decoding a message and posting the result).  This theme also
proves to be an oft-repeated one.  This can be thought of as the basis
behind the "hidden agenda" concept later implemented as Agenda Hats.

Treasure 107 was the first of a type of treasures I'm calling "collect
and win" treasures.  This example is actually not typical of the style;
finding it required owning trinkets buried in two other treasures.
The real prototype for these treasures was the Runestone of Jukkasjarvi,
treasure 122.  Here, there were a bunch of small puzzles, some of them
codes, some puzzles, and some game actions, and each treasure hunter had
only knowledge about one or a few fragments until they put their
knowledge together.  This would probably never have been found had the
map custodian not chosen to divulge certain details upon the play of a
map shard on the treasure; while it did not really require knowledge of
all the pieces and the map shard information, it did require knowledge
of most of the pieces and an alternate form of the map shard info which
was given as concealed clues in messages which apparently no player ever
found until after the treasure was found.  This sort of contest did not
catch on for a while, perhaps because the Jukkasjarvi one was seen as so
hard as to be uninteresting.

Treasures 109 and 110 began another genre of treasures, ones which
ask players to perform some significant non-game action.  In this case,
it was learning the Python language well enough to write interesting
programs.  I am calling these treasures "personal agenda" treasures;
they ask other players to either do something to the buryer's benefit
(outside of Ackanomic), or to engage in some activity the buryer
enjoys.  Treasures 115 and 116 would continue this theme, this time
asking players to write self-printing programs in a language created
by the buryer.  This theme tends to blend in with the puzzle-solving
theme which becomes popular later; treasures 115 and 116 can be
considered puzzles as much as they are asking players to learn a
programming language.  Treasure 119 is very much a puzzle.  Treasure
120 gets back to the original idea in this theme, in this case,
basically setting up an in-game payment for whoever completed a certain
bit of out-of-but-related-to-Acka work first.  Treasure 125 continues
the puzzle theme, and 126 continues to straddle the line between
puzzles and personal agendas, asking players to find and post the
location of hidden contests in Games Magazine.  Treasure 126 would
later see a sequel in treasure 181, and the apparent lack of interest
in T181 seems to support the idea that repeating old treasure ideas is
uninteresting.  (T126 may well have generated more interest *outside*
Ackanomic than T181 did *inside* it.  Eric Berlin, one of the co-authors
of the Orion's Crystal story from the April 1997 Games, recently noticed
me on the weekly National Puzzlers' League chat, and asked me to
explain Ackanomic to him well enough to give him a vague idea how I
was using his idea here.  I think he was intrigued that anybody else
used Orion's Crystal to refer to anything beyond his story.)  Treasure
167 was also firmly in this realm; a hard puzzle that really seemed to
require some research into past endeavors in that field, though the
actual solution seemed to be a new technique.  The puzzle-like treasures
have proven to be popular, and genuinely new puzzles are likely to be
candidates for good new treasures; however, such puzzles are rare and
difficult to invent, and as a result, it is not likely that we will
see a huge number of these.  However, it is entirely possible to do
such puzzles outside of Ackanomic; indeed, I have been doing so, and
even winning some small (real-world) prizes for doing so. [5]

Treasures 104, 128, and 152 are examples of treasures in perhaps the most
boring class of all: those which appear to be intended to remain buried
forever.  In these cases, no apparent clues about how to find the treasures
have come forth.

Treasures 169 and 173 started another series of treasures, which were
based on trivia and often quotations from books, movies, song lyrics, etc.
Treasures 183, 189, 190, 210, 239, 255, 259 and 274 continue this theme.
The problem with these is that they are either too easy, or web-searchable
easier than to get them from memory, or if not even web-searchable, so hard
that nobody can reasonably be expected to find them.

With the exception of the puzzle theme, most of these themes seem to be
already played out to the point of boredom.  This is why there are
no more interesting treasures these days.

1. Most of the burial announcements and other relevant messages about
treasures referenced in this thesis may be found at K 2's Treasure
archive, either at http://www.ackanomic.org/~k2/treasure/found.htm if
they have been found, or http://www.ackanomic.org/~k2/treasure/treasure.htm
if they have not been found.

2. The histories of subgames can be found at the Ackanomic Subgames page
at http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~dcr24/Nomic/Acka/subgames/index.html
and the many pages referenced on that page.

3. Rule 8-7, "Le Grand Fromage", awards a gouda for winning Grab A Donkey,
Party Chess, or three Games & Contest games with at least five players each.

4. June 9, 1999, in a message from T. T. Ren on the ackanomic list; one of
the conditions needed to receive one piece of the map is to win a subgame
with at least five players.  As of this writing, not on K 2's Treasure page.

5. See http://www.mathpuzzle.com/parity.html and
http://www.maa.org/features/mathchat/mathchat_7_1_99.html for two such
puzzles, and the http://www.mathpuzzle.com site as a whole for many
puzzles of this type and links to other appropriate sites.

------------------------------

From: JT <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: Otzma Card
Date: Sun, 04 Jul 1999 14:18:08 -0400 (EDT)

On Sat, 3 Jul 1999, Tom Walmsley wrote:
> Oh dear. I appear to have lost this map. I *do* remember how the series
> was generated but not the next number, and I also have a fairly good
> idea of what the map would have looked like. Give me a day or so and
> I'll re-work it all out. Either that or berate me for being dim and
> don't allow me to put things right, your choice :-)

I'm willing to allow you to put things right.

--Dragon Mage

-- 
[-------------------------------------------------------------------------]
[ Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.                  ]
[ It's hard to seize the day when you must first grapple with the morning ]
[-------------------------------------------------------------------------]

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From: "Gavin Logan" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Acka: phoebe (danke)
Date: Sun, 04 Jul 1999 15:34:47 -0400 (EDT)

rufus failed to post Phoebe's wisdom.
danke has found Phoebe's matchbox.

King Felix
(OiCoRT)

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Subject: Acka: Samizdat
From: Joseph DeVincentis <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Jul 1999 20:16:35 -0400 (EDT)

Underground Cyclopedia of Knowledge                                issue 14
      A publication of the Underground Press, a Samizdat organization

===========================================================================

In this issue:

Sponsor's Ad
Sub-game Summary

===========================================================================
Sponsored by The Ack at great expense: belly-up for 7 months straight!
===========================================================================

Sub-game Summary
by /dev/joe

Grab a donkey is progressing very slowly.  As a consequence of the
rule changes which allow a grabbed ass to remain the game amazingly
often, the game has no end in sight, with the remaining players having,
on average, over three donkeys apiece.

Abstract Crescent has reached a bit of a standstill.  As a result of
players taking extreme strategies, the player who picked the second
lowest number in several of the recent rounds has picked a number so
far above the winner's number that the bonus for the "winner" has
actually turned into a bit of a penalty.

Mediocrity will be done, soon. Emperor Ai! Pedrito astutely pointed out
after the results from the last round were posted that no matter who wins
this next round, somebody will win the game, though in each case, a
different player will win the game than won the round.  If either K 2
or /dev/joe wins the round, the game will end with each of the 5 players
having a different score, a result which is impossible with more than
5 players, since it requires a total score over all players of n*(n-1)/2,
which is greater than 2*n (the total score for which the game ends) for
n>5, and the only way to get a total score greater than that is if there 
is no most mediocre score for all total scores 2*n through n*(n-1)/2 - 1.
However, to have no most mediocre score, every player must have the same
score as at least one other player, which means there are at most n/2
different scores, and as soon as a player scores a point which causes this
to no longer be true, the game ends, with still at most n/2 + 1 different
scores, which is less than n for all the n under consideration.

YORL is moving along, or at least moving along for /dev/joe.  Everybody
else seems to be sitting on eir butt.  K 2 has encouraged other players
to interrupt, but beware the cost of frivolous interrupts.

Frog, frog, frog, mouse is also progressing.  K 2 seems to have decided
to stick with his current zoo which scores 8 points, about as much as
you could hope to get without matching the target zoo exactly.  But
please pass explicitly instead of letting default passes take effect, so
we can hope to move faster than one round per three days.  Several
players seem to have figured out at least part of the workings of
machine A, but machine B is still pretty much a mystery.  

Fictionary nears the end of the first pass through players being Brainiac,
and a couple players have shown their word knowledge to be far overhead
of that of most other players.

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End of ackanomic Digest V4 #177
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