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From: Bruce Stephens <bruce@liverpool.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Nudge, please:  Magic Toyshop
In-Reply-To: neild@echonyc.com's message of 15 Oct 1995 20:15:18 GMT
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Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 13:22:17 GMT
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>>>>> "Neil" == Neil Demause <neild@echonyc.com> writes:


> Yeah, but Catherine lies about the dot puzzle when she says it's to
> your advantage to go first. So I assumed it was a "well-known"
> puzzle that I simply wasn't familiar with (some British thing,
> perhaps), and which I needed to find a cheat for.

This is the dots and boxes game is it?  I think it is an advantage to
go first: it's dead easy to get a draw (2 boxes each).  It's just not
so easy to win!  It is a relatively well-known children's game, I
think; I remember playing it, anyway, although it's possible I have
strange parents.

> I also tried a brute-force search of the options (with a friend
> who's better at these things than I) and didn't get anywhere, so
> this may be a harder puzzle than you had though.

I wrote a program to do a brute force exhaustive search yesterday, and
assuming I got it right, there *is* a forced win for the first player
(3 boxes to 1).  I'm not too confident, though, it's entirely possible
I made an error in writing the program.

> Well, Catherine also tells you that it's a parity puzzle. (Though if
> you don't know how parity works, you're screwed.) Not that this
> helped me solve it, though.

I think this one requires cheating, and I don't know how.  My guess is
I don't have an appropriate object.

I thought the naughts and crosses puzzle was neat.
-- 
Bruce                   Institute of Advanced Scientific Computation
bruce@liverpool.ac.uk   University of Liverpool
http://supr.scm.liv.ac.uk/~bruce/

