Quick Zendo story
Jan. 31st, 2012 04:23 pmPlaying Zendo with Jordan, Nic, Julian, Hunter. Jordan is master, and afraid his rule is too hard, though the game has only gone a few turns so far. Then Nic guesses, "A koan is white[0] if there is a flat piece which points at another piece and does not touch another piece."
Jordan starts thinking about how to build a counterexample... and then starts trying to balance a large on top of two smalls. You can balance a large on top of three smalls, I point out, but that's no good, he says. (I'm still not sure what he was going for there?) Then he tries to balance a large on the points of two larges! We begin to wonder what sort of crazy rule Jordan had come up with, and I start saying, "I think the rule is that even if Nic's guess isn't logically equivalent, if you can't actually build the counterexample, he still wins...".
Finally, after several minutes, Jordan just puts an upright large over an upright small and marks it white. But Nic was out of guessing stones, so Julian went next and won with "A koan is white if there is a piece which points at another piece and does not touch another piece." (Or as Jordan had thought of it, "a koan is black if every piece which points, also touches".)
-Harry
[0]Since we were using Go stones to mark the koans, we just used a symmetric white/black distinction. However some of those there (Jordan included) actually didn't like the symmetry and decided to designate black as the "positive" color...
Jordan starts thinking about how to build a counterexample... and then starts trying to balance a large on top of two smalls. You can balance a large on top of three smalls, I point out, but that's no good, he says. (I'm still not sure what he was going for there?) Then he tries to balance a large on the points of two larges! We begin to wonder what sort of crazy rule Jordan had come up with, and I start saying, "I think the rule is that even if Nic's guess isn't logically equivalent, if you can't actually build the counterexample, he still wins...".
Finally, after several minutes, Jordan just puts an upright large over an upright small and marks it white. But Nic was out of guessing stones, so Julian went next and won with "A koan is white if there is a piece which points at another piece and does not touch another piece." (Or as Jordan had thought of it, "a koan is black if every piece which points, also touches".)
-Harry
[0]Since we were using Go stones to mark the koans, we just used a symmetric white/black distinction. However some of those there (Jordan included) actually didn't like the symmetry and decided to designate black as the "positive" color...
