site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3034 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 24, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Anybody else play Picross? I've been a Picross fiend since a friend lent me Mario's Picross on the original Gameboy back in elementary school. I don't think I ever gave it back. I was overjoyed when it got released on the DS, as I hadn't played it in probably 10 years at that point. I even played the kinda goofy 3D Picross.

There are a shit ton of them on the Switch. Slowly working my way through Picross S3 these days. I think they are up to Picross S8 though. It's more or less an annual title.

I don't think I've ever actually met another live human who played them, minus that one friend who got me hooked way back when.

I've played so much liouh.com/picross/. It's a randomly generated puzzle each time. It's very responsive and lightweight. And you get a very colourful victory effect after painstakingly filling those cells. Sometimes you get a puzzle with multiple solutions but the game will only accept one and give you the disappointing grey ending if you arbitrarily pick wrong.

Just searching for it now, I found a new version, liouh.com/picross2/ which changes the game a bit so you can make a wrong move and correct it later, instead of having each mistake immediately pointed out. It feels a bit more like sudoku now.

I always thought that the best way to describe the game is "binary sudoku with regular expressions" but none of my CS uni peers agreed :(

edit: fixed links

1679718010868 has 2 solutions

Are the puzzles guaranteed solvable?

Yeah that's one example where there are two possible solutions but the game only accepts one. I think this is because each game is generated by first randomly coming up with the desired board state, and then deriving the row and column rules from that. But the same set of row and column rules can be satisfied by multiple board states.

However I put the same seed in the second version of the game and it accepted both solutions.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats