I suck. Oh well, at least I've spotted a leak that I didn't know I had.

Santa gifted points in Timed to those who had been nice this year. Shame that I had apparently been naughty, since I only got negative points.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Looking forward to Zac's "Triplechain 2012 year overview"

My DC is gonan be tough to beat today

fu paul

The game has changed, everyone's gotten a lot better, and the lower-rated players are closing the gap pretty quickly. Which means that pretty much everyone who was in the top 10 after the rerun was rated too highly.

Edit: Can I just add an addendum moan; even though I made a basic mistake yesterday, was still 60% to win. Again it didn't come in.

I thought my DC of today would be a top score but not a winner

For the moment it has resisted all the TC superstars

if gabe wins today it's not worth playing tomorrow, alex is definitely gonna win

I've seen a few new names playing in the past week or so. Is there any particular reason why new players are showing up?

There can be multiple winners!

What on Earth are you talking about? I was merely recapping the Timed game that we played on 23rd-24th.

Butnah, popcorn wins with 22 last racks, so you were just around 50 % to win there.

So, I won another DC, after a 7 month break, longest break between two wins?

After my third latest win I've played 72 DCs, and had two wins in them, solid win-% of 2.78. However, I've been more than 0 % to win 32 out of 72 with last racks, and should've won 8.95 DCs based on odds, a much better looking win-% of 12.43. Below are the odds of winning from highest to lowest (wins bolded), clearly I need at least 80 % to even have a chance, and even then I win only two in three. #soundsaboutright

93
83
80
78
60
59
43
42
40
40
30
26
26
25
22
20
19
16
16
15
11
9
8
7
7
5
5
3
3
2
1
1

Getting to level 18 might be tough.

History was made yesterday, it was the first time there was a 50k+ DC score.

Well done!

So nobody has even tried? I guess we don't need a puzzle maker after all, shame.

People are of course free to do whatever they want, but I don't really understand why so few want to challenge themselves intellectually by solving puzzles. Even more so because TC players should generally speaking be pretty smart. #puzzling

There aren't many puzzlers. I think constructing puzzles is hardly going to be worth the effort.

We should try and find a new source of new players. The game is interesting enough for it.

Unfortunately you are probably correct with what the situation is atm. I think all the puzzles I've planned require at least one play that hasn't come up in a real puzzle so far, that is what puzzle maker should be about imo; making innovative puzzles. But yea, probably not worth the effort to come up with any new puzzles. Shame really, since I think two of the puzzles have pretty amazing solutions, and the others aren't that bad either!

Agreed, that would be great.

i really enjoy puzzle mode - i'd probably rank the different games: DC, puzzle, timed, advanced/normal mode.

The problem is that life is short and i have a million and one things to do, so that when I come to play TC it's to take a brief break. Some of the puzzles are perfect for that - ones that are non-trivial, but not very hard. I don't really have the time to try the really hard ones, and in general there are too many puzzles and it's too hard to identify which puzzles are likely to be good ones, so i often default to brain-off-button-clicking-advanced-mode, rather than hunt around for an interesting looking puzzle. And when I do find one, and break the record, i usually find that you've come and improved it further :cross:

Pretty annoyed about today's DC. Again.

Understandable. However there a quite a few other players who play Normal/Advanced regularly, but pretty much never try puzzles, other than poopy's 9th rack ones. Also the difficult puzzles are by far the most challenging TC mode, and I wonder why some of the good players never seem to try them. I mean, I don't expect people to solve all puzzles, but what is the newest difficult puzzle that has been solved by someone else than myself, Anton or Gaby?

And it isn't a complete waste of time to challenge yourself to solving difficult problems either, practicing your analytical and lateral thinking skills is a good thing in general.

What do you mean by a puzzle being a good one, same as 'ones that are non-trivial, but not very hard'? Have you tried picking some randomly just by their difficulty rating? By your definition I would rule out 1s and 2s as trivial, 5s too difficult, some 4s could meet the criteria, some are really challenging though, so I'm thinking 3s should be the closest option.

Puzzles always make me feel incredibly stupid, worthless and depressed.

I do a maths PhD. I have enough challenging puzzles as it is (one in particular which is doing my head in). I also don't really see them as that interesting. I see them as an enumeration problem, like sudokus; eventually if you try enough methods, one will work. So it's just churning through those methods. I get no satisfaction whatsoever upon completing them, just relief that the torture is over. Every time I play one I remember why I don't play them often.

I find Triplechain interesting because it provides a different challenge, one similar to that provided by backgammon, which I also play. Some spots can be solved by enumerating possibilities, but some are so complicated that you have to go by a combination of some enumeration plus intuition gained through experience. On top of that, even though I (think I) understand the game well, roughly half of games give me at least one spot I haven't ever thought about before.

I guess also I'm naturally predisposed to liking games of chance, given that the main games I play are poker, Triplechain and backgammon. Which is ironic, given that I hate gambling and variance. Maybe it's because chance forces more variety. Or maybe it's because I hate myself.

For example, in yesterday's DC, I made my play in Round 4 based on a mix of enumeration and intuition. And I'm pretty sure I made a mistake in Round 5 because I didn't think laterally. I have never thought about that spot before.

So I went back and solved Puzzle 20, "Too many 1s/2s? (4)", which is the earliest puzzle I hadn't completed, and, yeah, I still hate them. Only felt relief when I finally solved it.

This, we already knew

The variance part, to be exact

good as in 'meets my needs, yes.

I wasn't really aware that there were difficulty ratings. I tend to go by how many people have solved them.

I definitely do enjoy the hard ones when i have the space to devote to them, but i'm usually only devoting ~5 minutes to a bit of downtime to them, so it tends to be impractical.

Well, that isn't good. You've clearly improved in regular TC this year, puzzles next?

This one?



So you've done a 180 on them? I believe your comments in the beginning were positive, and iirc even recently you mentioned thinking about solving some of the difficult ones, and now you hate them.

Sure, there is a limited amount of options (still a lot). Things aren't that simple though. When using the goal score (I believe you do this), and trying to get the setup you know you need to get, I can see things getting boorish*, and mechanical. But when you don't know what you need to score, you have much more freedom for creativity, trying to work out how to score as much as possible. Maybe you should try the one I posted itt, where you don't know the goal score.

So you hate yourself, and you hate puzzles. Only conclusion from this is that you have to play more puzzles.

*http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/show...Number=3569538

This would be a pretty good indicator, if people played them. As it is, difficulty ratings are better imo.

Stats.

Daily rating for the year: -18
Daily rating compared to the highest point: -55
Timed rating for the year: -5
Timed rating compared to the highest point: -12



DC stats: