Overwhelming Gearwheels: Comments on Overwhelming Gearwheels 2019-01

7 Comments.

-- Anonymous 2019-01-02 02:55 UTC

Well, those are some overwhelming gearwheels, all right: a functioning replica of the Antikythera Mechanism made from LEGO. Pretty cool!

What anonymous memetic pollinator left that link?

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-01-02 05:39 UTC

Sorry, it was me! Spiny Mel!

-- Anonymous 2019-01-05 01:43 UTC

I'm probably an easily crushed newb for most of these games and won't have any spare bandwidth for the first few months of this year but I could probably be persuaded later in the year to play Alien City, Cosmic Encounter, Tak, Ultima, and/or Zendo online. It might be fun to play the piecepack compatible games (Alien City, Tak (smaller variants), and Ultima) "play by (e)mail" where on my moves I also send back a piecepackr diagram of the current state of the game and at the end of the game make an animation of the entire game to post on the piecepack wiki -- those three games involve placing or moving pieces on a rectangular grid (initially random in the case of Alien City) so shouldn't be crazy difficult to communicate one's moves in such a fashion.

-- TrevorLDavis 2019-01-05 10:46 UTC

Trevor, the experiment you suggest could be really fun and would be a good test of piecepackr. Actually, if we have a good place to host the graphics (I'm thinking GitHub), we could play some demo games on the Piecepack Wiki.

Ultima moves can be communicated with something like standard Chess notation. It would be cool if piecepackr could ingest games of several kinds in algebraic notation and emit animations.

Zendo can be played with a piecepack. It might be a good stress test of piecepackr.

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-01-05 16:40 UTC

Rereading the rules to Piecepack Cooking, it seems they could really benefit from some piecepackr diagrams.

Also, would we be playing Alien City with a virtual StackPack?

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-01-05 16:48 UTC

The moves in Alien City should also be cleanly expressible by establishing a grid and using "fairy" chess notation (using the "drop" notation used in variants like Bughouse to introduce pieces to the board or movied from some notion of a 'pocket' space off the board) what piece gets added where. http://ccif.sourceforge.net/chess-variants.html The set-up of an Alien City board can also probably be expressed in fairy chess notation if the type of lot is also considered a type of piece but probably easier if I just write some code to generate random Alien City boards and send you an image of the board (maybe adding grid annotation on the sides so the lots are cleanly labeled).
We could play publicly play games on the wiki (perhaps host an graphic of the current state as well as animation of the game up to then). Source code to build the images could be hosted on Github, it would probably make more sense to host the actual images somewhere like my website, the wiki, or some kind of dedicated image hosting service.
It would be cool to be able to ingest games of several kinds in algebraic notation and emit animations -- this should probably be a spin-off project that uses piecepackr.
We could play Alien City with a virtual StackPack but I was thinking of doing it with Piecepack Pyramids faked to look like Icehouse pyramids (the dimensions won't quite be the same but it won't matter for Alien City) and then maybe if I'm feeling ambitious also faking more abstract Alien City components in a way not at all compatible with the piecepack standards. Although piecepackr doesn't yet include piecepack pyramids in the included print-and-play layout generator there is support to easily add them to rule diagrams.

-- TrevorLDavis 2019-01-05 19:47 UTC