CW: Loud obnoxious noises, gross stuff with food, high energy editing, a man in a goblin costume, base humour, an abundance of silliness, honestly I wouldn’t watch
You don’t have to watch this, I’ll explain. The two hosts are making mini candy food, except that every time they trigger one of Rules Goblin’s rules some loud noise happens. The idea is to guess each one of Rules Goblin’s rules.
I thought that this was a neat game to adapt for testing purposes, as it is essentially like Zendo, a rules induction game. I use Zendo to help teach focus/defocus techniques in exploration and it can help with test design also. The activity doesn’t have to me making tiny sushi, it can be anything, and that’s the joy of how adaptable it is. You can do it in person, or online. You can do it with speech or actions or text or whatever you like, and sometimes exploring the limitations can be part of the exploration.
To celebrate this new finding I have set up 5 rules of my own. Anyone who posts a reply (anywhere within this post’s replies) that triggers this word I will, when I get around to it, reply with a word of all capital letters, like CHEESE. If anyone guesses the rule, such that I cannot create a suitable counterexample, then I’ll say so and the rule has been found. I’ll also happily answer any questions you might have about the game.
In the interests of decorum none of the rules have to do with swearing, etc.
And if I’m not supposed to run games on here let me know and I’ll move it elsewhere. I hope you all try to run your own induction games, and I look forward to seeing the replies!
The 5 rules reminds me of the peg game that had you guess 4 pegs and getting a score for correct colour pegs. Mastermind worked with pretty much the same rules as wordle Wordle - Wikipedia . I once saw a version of a rule guessing game by James Bach I think it was where the rules would be applied to a roll of dice, the player must guess what the total of the die pips is, but it’s not totalled by simply adding them all together. There was always a rule (or two). After 5 or 6 dice rolls, the controller changes the rule, in order to force you to move more quickly to a correct guess and forcing you to take chances strategically and think really hard about how, sometimes, the rules we have to operate under are not even sensible. Anyway, I’ve waffled on long enough to not get any cheese at all, but it’s really good being able to spend a bit of time each morning engaging with smart people on the MOT club. So thanks for this interesting icebreaker to my day Chris.
Mastermind and Wordle are interesting because they’re abductive games - ones with known parameters and incomplete data. We’re drawing a logical conclusion out of known facts, rather than a principle out of inferences based on observations.
Bach used the dice game during my RST course to help teach focus/defocus and new style thinking. I talked with him afterwards and we drew strong comparisons between Zendo and the dice game, and he praised Zendo’s ability to handle isomorphic answers by needing a counterexample (no counterexample means a successful guess).
Finding a sensible rule is an interesting part of induction games. Some rules are easy to trigger but hard to find, like an error that we can’t track the source of, and some rules are hard to trigger - and those make for creative defocusing sessions where we try different general approaches to try to at least find what kind of rule it might be.
What I’ll do, Chris, is mention your name, in case one rule involves a self-deprecatingly self-referential word and in case the words have some relation to the rule.
Let me also mention Zendo, logic puzzles, induction, testing, and glorious cheese.
Speaking of the dice game, I’ve created an online version loosely based on it:
Here’s a question: can the rules involve any outside circumstances (such as time of posting), or only the contents of the replies? In case you’d rather see us testing the limitations, I’ll also just make this a comment reply and edit it like a .
I can’t figure out what are replies and what aren’t because the “reply” bit at the top just seems to come and go at will. I’m guessing that it shows it as a reply, then never mentions it again after that. That’s what the post deleting is about, nothing to do with the game I’m just fighting the UX. If any mods see this please delete this post and the other one I deleted, many thanks.
Speaking of the dice game, I’ve created an online version loosely based on it:
I’ll definitely check that out, there aren’t enough induction games in the world. Edit: That guess bar is trippy, is it AI powered?
The limitations of the game are interesting, aren’t they? When you come to think about it testing is a game without the nice limits that Zendo puts into how koans are built (independent of environment, players and orientation). Also the rules might not exist, and we don’t know how many there are.
I’ll say that the time of posting has no effect, and only the contents of replies will trigger a rule - so number of likes or who posted the reply won’t trigger a rule. They’d make for interesting rules but I also don’t want to be prejudicial towards time zones or encourage people to make sock puppets for testing things out :3.
Game Rule 3: Anything outside of the content of replies doesn’t trigger a rule.
If a reply is not empty, you will reply with MINIMUM
If a reply includes your name, you will reply with ANTIHERO
If a reply includes a Ministry of Testing emoji, you will reply with PAULRAND
And to perhaps provoke some additional words, I will tag someone (hello @conrad.connected, do you have any baked goods or other culinary treats to look forward to today?) and use a quote:
I am excited about having apple pie in the fridge.
But enough formatting. If I were thinking up rules, maybe I’d tease people a little by having a rule aboutt meking an typo. You know what, it would be smarter if I put guesses in separate replies…
I thought about it, but was afraid it wouldn’t be deterministic enough and that it would worsen response time. Instead I’m checking keywords in the guess, and variations of those keywords.
If a reply is not empty, you will reply with MINIMUM
No, a reply such as the following would not trigger that
He saw deep space a soft yellow. 3: There was no ice cream in store. Nor did they have money… to go to there. Joe made the sugar treats; Susan ate them. ###1
If a reply includes your name, you will reply with ANTIHERO
Correct! Although there’s a technical counterexample I’m going to let you off this one. I will no longer display this rule trigger reply.
It’s a difficult balance. Computers have to be told what to do ahead of time and it makes interpreting isomorphic descriptions of problems difficult. “No more than 10”, “10 or below”, “Less than or equal to 10”, “Under 11 during the hours of daylight and also at night time” are all the same guess in ways that matter to the problem.
How about a reply that starts with the same letter it ends with?
Hmm. Nothing triggering there.
I’ve noticed that the post formatting might not like me replying to each and every post, and it gets hard to read (you have to make use of the reply dropdown under each post to see what I’m referring to each time). So if I get a lot of small replies I might collate them all and reply in larger blocks.
I’m learning a lot about running this game as it progresses, I’m keeping notes in case anyone else wants to try something like this, and I want to write it up somewhere afterwards.
If a reply contains a comma, you reply with MINIMUM
The following does not contain a comma, yet would trigger the rule:
Today I bought a raincoat and wore it on a sunny day. There is no better feeling than staring at a wall with closed eyes. The clouds formed beautiful animals in the sky that eventually created a tornado to wreak havoc. ### 1:2&3:4 They’re playing the piano while flying in the plane.
If a reply contains an image, you reply with PAULRAND
The following would trigger the rule, but does not contain an image:
Nobody questions who built the pyramids in Mexico.
We’re careful about orange ping pong balls because people might think they’re fruit.
.
##
Correct! Although there’s a technical counterexample I’m going to let you off this one. I will no longer display this rule trigger reply.
