skell
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Frustration is an important part of any game... you don't want to get rid of it. That wouldn't make the game more enjoyable, it makes it boring. Potentially frustratingly boring.

I'd rather differentiate by the frustration caused by your own lack of skills and by the lacking interface. When I play Might and Magic X I get frustrated because the movement in the game is so slow and it absolutely does not make the game more enjoyable. it is similar to repeating the same sequence of keys in DROD vs. using multiple levels of undo. You might enjoy this - I don't and I am sure there are other people in both camps - as I have already said in a previous post it's just a matter of taste.

Is it really "solving" a room if you get to the end and have a frankenreplay that's so stitched together than you can't recognize it. It already happens a bit with checkpoints.

I disagree wholeheartedly. There is no 'good' or 'bad' solving as long as you have fun. And if you really need to differentiate between the two, then I think the problem lies somewhere completely else and has less to do with UU and more about... I don't even know what.

The only exception for me is when it really is about repeating the same sequence.[...] I can definitely see how UU is a big help there... but that isn't a selling point for me, because it also means that there's more tolerance and so more use of it can be made.

Anecdotal evidence: I have almost exclusively used UU to avoid repeating the same sequence of keys. The few cases where I tried trying all combinations were unfruitful and in all cases I went back to rethink the solution.

I wanted to make a recording of John Cage's 4'33"...

I think that's the point. You have a need for the activity you do to fit into your metaphilophysical frame. So it happens that UU does not fit into it which, more than anything else, leads to your issues with the idea of UU. It's okay, that's how you are and I absolutely don't want to imply that it is bad. My metaphilophysical is simply different and that's it.

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Pinnacle
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Whenever a game adds a mechanic that helps with ease-of-use, there are always claims that the game is being dumbed down. The UU debate reminds me of the addition of a "snap camera to monster" button in Monster Hunter. There was a vocal portion of the playerbase that claimed that adding this feature reduced the skill cap of the game and made it too easy.

What did it really do though? It allowed you to focus all your attention on the fight, resulting in a game that emphasizes its core strengths in a better way, rather than diluted by the distraction of fiddling with the camera every few seconds. UU does the same thing. The sheer size of the game tree makes it so brute force isn't an option. Even with UU, you need to understand the room and have a strategy. UU simply allows you to experiment with the tactics a bit more, that way you can know if your current strategy won't work a bit faster. It doesn't reduce challenge or depth, it simply reduces annoyance.

Now, I concede that UU does get rid of the risk/reward balance of deciding how often you want to retreat to a checkpoint, but a room that requires me to choose between the optimal path and the checkpointed path always feels a little wrong. (The most blatant example is the now-obsolete trend of "checkpoint traps" like these.) That said, it is an actual strategic element that UU removes, so it's worth pointing out in the interest of fairness.

Another point in favor of UU is that it can (rather tediously) be replicated by writing down all your moves. A general guideline for game balance is if there's something that can be done within the game rules to confer an advantage, and it's not fun, either provide a better way to do it or change the game to make it unviable. The only way to make writing down moves unviable is to add randomness, which is obviously unthinkable. So the only other option is to make it more convenient to do this. Expecting players to play suboptimally for the best experience is never good design.

As an aside, I want to point out that I don't think this feature request opened up a can of worms at all. Just because there's disagreement doesn't mean there's any hostility. There are good points on both sides, personally I'm for UU, but it's definitely a tradeoff rather than strictly an upgrade. I think the things it adds are more significant than the things it takes away, so it's an improvement, but that part is really subjective.

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Trickster
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I see no reason to rehash all this detritus, but in case you have been living under a rock, here are my thoughts (yet again) summarized in no-I'm-not-actually-trying-to-argue-it-again format.

I don't think UU is the end of DROD.

I don't like UU. Mainly this is because it turns "think before you act" into "find the correct branch of the tree with trial and error". This ruins most non-lynchpin puzzles (tar, horde, trap doors, efficiency, etc) for me. Good players don't run headlong into actions: we have to actually think about what will happen in detail several moves in advance before acting. This is the thing that UU ruins: the executive functioning portion of DROD where you have to plan out your actions in advance of an actual attempt. A lot of puzzles become trivial if you don't have to think them out in advance.

Let me use a geeky example. Monkey Island 1 and 2 are hard games. They're hard because the number of actions is not easily limited. You can't solve them (in the hard mode anyway) by simply trying every action on every object, because there are too many actions and objects to use. But by the time you get to the fourth installment, that's all gone. The actions are so reduced that you can actually just try every action on every object to progress and no intelligent thought is required. And that's just not fun for me.

In DROD, there are puzzles that are unbelievably hard (in some of the Smitemaster's Selections) where the solution is seven or eight moves long. It seems obvious to me that the thrill of wracking your brain no longer applies as much to some of these puzzles.

Yes, of course I will use UU. Once it's fair game, those of us who play this game competitively don't have a lot of choice in the matter. Artificially restricting yourself is neither easy nor fun, though allowing UU will probably make most of the holds I enjoy less enjoyable.

I tire of seeing people say "you can turn it off" because that isn't a reasonable suggestion when you're a competitive player. When someone says "if you don't want it don't use it" this tells me they don't understand my point of view at all. This gulf of "OMG you still don't understand what I'm saying" is probably a large source of the rancor here.

All that said, I'm rather curious about the correlation between UU-support and age. I would expect it to be negative and legitimate in effect size. Some of us used to play games back when they were unforgivably difficult (this is not meant to be snide or condescending), and I suspect a bit of that nostalgia is associated with taking sides on this issue.

...maybe.

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Pinnacle
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But you really, really can't brute force it. Every move has 11 possible actions. A string of 8 moves has 11^8=214,358,881 possibilities. Most meaningful actions are even more than that. To brute-force every 30-move combination, if you did one per nanosecond, would take 40,000 times the age of the universe (17,449,402,268,886,407,318,558,803,753,801 combinations.) The argument that people will attempt to brute force anything simply doesn't work. UU doesn't let you use trial and error to reach a solution without actually understanding it, you need to narrow the game tree down somehow. You simply can't search the entire thing.

These threads might also be of historical interest.

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[Last edited by Pinnacle at 06-15-2014 09:52 PM]

Trickster
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Pinnacle wrote:
But you really, really can't brute force it. Every move has 11 possible actions. A string of 8 moves has 11^8=214,358,881 possibilities. Most meaningful actions are even more than that. To brute-force every 30-move combination, if you did one per nanosecond, would take 40,000 times the age of the universe (17,449,402,268,886,407,318,558,803,753,801 combinations.) The argument that people will attempt to brute force anything simply doesn't work.

No. Heuristics which require very little thought can drastically reduce the number of moves at each step.

There are a very small number of puzzles which used to be very hard that will become fairly easy. But they do exist.

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hyperme
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You know, given some thought, I'm ever so slightly, barely so, I mean I hardly noticed, vaguely insulted by the whole 'peeps will brute force rooms with UU' thing. Why? Because it's assuming that the reason that people don't brute force is not because they don't want too, but because the option is not available. 'but hyperme, I'm not assuming that' you say, because nobody ever realizes negative connotations until it's too late. But if you think that UU will have a drastic shift in the way rooms are designed, or that UU is now required to be competitive, you've have effective assumed that a significant portion of the DROD player based is going to switch to UU and destroy puzzles forever, despite the fact there is no evidence for such a thing. woo yeah?

also one step undo is terrible because drod is chaotic i already <3 three step because i don't get screwed over by unpredictable tar growth anymore.

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Dischorran
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FWIW, I'm a roguelike fan (way too much time sunk into Nethack and ToME) and grew up in the brutal era of adventure games and RPGs (see, for instance, my avatar). And I'm firmly in the UU camp. I like DROD as a puzzle game rather than a tactical planning game, and tend to see limited undo as an artificial barrier between me and the puzzle. It's like saying that I have to start a crossword from the very beginning if I discover a mistaken entry instead of just erasing the wrong letters.

I think all my holds would be better served with UU. Certainly some rooms would look nicer if I could get away with fewer checkpoints. I've also struggled with how to place checkpoints appropriately without giving away the intended route through a room, and in principle UU could let me avoid giving away my devious plans by having to put a checkpoint off in the apparently useless backside of the room.

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I hope UU doesn't mean the checkpoint situation becomes worse... Sufficient well-placed checkpoints should result in the need to repeat sections, even with single-move undo, being minimized. Architects should assume a worst-case scenario when designing rooms, i.e. that the player is using traditional single-move undo, and plan checkpoints accordingly.

UU does mean, in theory at least, that checkpoints are not necessary. The "Show Checkpoints" option in the settings could be used to hide them, perhaps improving the appearance of rooms. The problem with this is that the restore system rather depends on checkpoints...

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I did not find a situation in TSS where I solved rooms through the power of UU brute-forcing.

Either I figured out what I was supposed to do in the room or I did not.

Like maybe this is going to ruin the optimizing game forever? But as I recall you guys were running programs to automatically replugin X moves into the game as it was.

Chaco
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Banjooie wrote:
Like maybe this is going to ruin the optimizing game forever? But as I recall you guys were running programs to automatically replugin X moves into the game as it was.

Probably not. I mean, yeah, people were using those programs on rooms like Lunchbreak Special : Inside the Dungeon : 3 South, 5 West and Pitiful : Secret Level 2 : Hall of Warriors : 1 South, 1 East where the room was really long and there weren't any checkpoints. But there are several rooms where blindly trying different moves won't necessarily lead to improvement - you might need a new approach (like doing room sections in different order), or to know a lot of optimizing heuristics like moving Beethro towards intermediate goals while killing monsters. Optimization takes a lot of learning and experience, which in no way is skipped by using Unlimited Undo.

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The optimizing game isn't going to be killed by UU. If anything, it will be revitalized - now it focuses more on the core game of optimizing, and less on having mountains of free time to burn replaying moves. So yeah, you don't have a choice if you're a current competitive player. Your advantage probably got nerfed, though certainly not enough to undo years of crystallization of the score board.

Also, I endorse hyperme's comment.

Also also, lol @ Trickster keeping to "not arguing this again" right up until the very first response.

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I would like to throw my hat into the ring here. I kinda like UU just because I like playing that style of play. If those that have TSS play the last hold that I made with UU (Stalwart defense), I think that it would be a lot more enjoyable.

I also think that this is the kind of hold that now becomes possible with UU. I will freely admit that it is not good under Gunthro, but I hope people will change their minds about it.

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Banjooie wrote: Like maybe this is going to ruin the optimizing game forever? But as I recall you guys were running programs to automatically replugin X moves into the game as it was.

[emphasis mine to highlight, and assuming "you guys" == "optimizers" in this context]

I have never cheated in this way or any other. Not once.

I also am very happy for purely selfish reasons to finally have UU in the main engine.

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Panther I can't begin to tell you how incredibly nice it was.

I didn't actually notice it was set as an option until halfway through the hold because I don't actually look at options.


And yes the 'optimizers' part was supposed to be implied by the sentence in fact being, about, the optimizing game, yes. Also I guess I wouldn't have considered it cheating, because it doesn't solve the puzzle for you

Where IS Halyavin anyway

skell
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Banjooie wrote:
Where IS Halyavin anyway

Busy writing DROD solver I suppose

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mrimer
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Props (and positive rank points) to everyone for articulating a lot of well thought out points regarding subjective play experiences. That's not easy to do.

Here are some sundry thoughts and responses from me, since this is a hot topic:

* I grew up playing games from pretty much the first days of Rogue, Wizardry, etc. When you die, you're dead. Saving game was only to take a break from play, and not as a safety net. I learned to master that type of environment. I was about seven-years-old at the time and an outlier. I can see there's a certain satisfaction hardcore players get from doing that. I'm not trying to make DROD into that type of experience. There are too many puzzles out there for people to enjoy (in DROD-space alone!), and hardly enough time to enjoy them all, that I'd rather make them quicker to work through and experience, at least from the execution side, rather than longer.

* UU is being added in 5.0 both to cater to fans who have requested it as well as to make the DROD experience more accessible to the masses. I acknowledge that's going in the wrong metaphysical direction from what bwross is looking for. That being said, I'm confident TSS will not feel watered down, even with UU.

* Also, it's interesting to me that bwross said he would be tempted to use UU once it's an option in the game. When one is "tempted," it implies they acknowledge there's something positive, in some certain respect, in the choice, and those positives must be weighed against the negatives. If something had no visible positives, it wouldn't be a temptation, after all. So, I'd say that when positives outweigh negatives for a player, it is a net-good decision to make that choice. Of course, tradeoffs (even just meta/philosophical ones) remain. But there are always tradeoffs, in every decision, or an experience would be meaningless. For instance, a player could think to himself, possibly subconsciously, "I won't ever rotate my sword unless I have to. If I did, I wouldn't feel good about myself." There are a slew of emergent positives and negatives inherent in that line of thinking. Ultimately, I want the player to be able to decide and choose the most positive way they want to play for their own personal reasons.

* With UU in use, checkpoints are still useful. They provide visual/spatial markers for instantly undoing sets of moves back to semantically distinct points in time/room state. UU can't provide those instant jumps to known positions/game states.

* I've been watching Pearls' entertaining LP of TCB. He plays fast! I input moves much more slowly. Pearls inputs moves like a speed chess player, while I'm the kind of guy that plays twitch-action games like DOOM the way I play DROD, carefully maximizing each piece of ammo I pick up. (Naturally, my level completion times were terrible.) Notwithstanding Pearls only having one-move undo, I see he's still willing to play quickly and potentially mess up, having to rapidly redo a section multiple times, rather than play slowly enough (like, say, ThemsAllTook as another LPer I have top of mind) to be certain that every move has the intended consequences before making the next move. These different play styles show me that, independent of the number of undos available, a player will have their own play style. I don't foresee UU turning ThemsAllTook into a speed player like Pearls. Not making a judgment call either way -- on camera, I can see they're simply different play styles, and I get something positive, while distinct, from experiencing each.

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bwross
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Quick question: All this talk of people wanting to use UU to avoid repeating the same key sequence... does that mean that there's also a redo key coming?

skell wrote: taste.

Is it really "solving" a room if you get to the end and have a frankenreplay that's so stitched together than you can't recognize it. It already happens a bit with checkpoints.

I disagree wholeheartedly. There is no 'good' or 'bad' solving as long as you have fun. And if you really need to differentiate between the two, then I think the problem lies somewhere completely else and has less to do with UU and more about... I don't even know what.

It's not about "good" or "bad", it's about what is. That was an epistemological question, and an important one to cognitive science (that's the "what"... I was waxing a bit philosophical there). There is definitely a difference between having an answer to a puzzle and solving one, because you could just have the solution given to you without understanding it. It's interesting to consider where the line is... where knowledge of an answer becomes the knowledge of the solution. The range of what people find fun almost certainly straddles that line, so it doesn't follow that a person who had fun also solved the puzzle. Personally, it makes me fell uneasy when I see one of my own replays is a frankenreplay... because it feels like I've somehow managed to solve little pieces, but somehow missed the whole picture. I've replayed rooms because of that, just to get a holistic solution.

Pinnacle wrote:
Whenever a game adds a mechanic that helps with ease-of-use, there are always claims that the game is being dumbed down.

Personally, I don't think that... the game with evolve to the new space. Some puzzles will take a hit, but it also opens up territory... anything that reduces frustration does this. New tension will be applied to make up for the tension that's lost to maintain the limit that people enjoy (which is well established in a long running game). Otherwise the game will shift towards boring.

Pinnacle wrote:
It doesn't reduce [...] depth, it simply reduces annoyance.

It does both. That's the trade-off... reduction of annoyance on the puzzle core at the cost of moves having real consequence, which is part of the depth of the theme. If care about the abstract core absolutely over the heart and soul of the theme, then, yeah, you can easily be blind to that loss. It's big for me, because I like theme... it keeps things from getting too dry and draws focus away from the abstract core of a game which gives better emersion. I'm willing to take the hit in frustration for that... especially, since undo typically isn't that big a deal. I hardly missed it in my recent AE KDD play, and my estimation of the current situtation is that three levels is more than enough for correcting errors (from watching my play, two tends to be good enough to fix a slip up almost always... one isn't always now, mostly because of pressure plates increasing the number of things that can happen in a turn). My guess is that the effectivness of undo is O(1/n), where n is number of levels... so you get diminising results pretty quick. I would have been much more happy with a hard coded three undo... no option. That's a bit more than I think is needed, but TSS would probably eat up some of that leeway. But UU crosses all sorts of lines for me... in the theme case, it's in the signal it sends about how important the thematic heart of the game is.

Pinnacle wrote:
But you really, really can't brute force it. Every move has 11 possible actions. A string of 8 moves has 11^8=214,358,881 possibilities.

And yet I've done it! I'm awesome!

Because you don't get anywhere near all the combinations in practice... many branches of the tree are quickly pruned off with the heuristic of "that kills Beethro" in this sort of puzzle. Add a few more heuristics like "Beethro is trapped" and "that golem shouldn't be killed here" and the tree can get pretty scraggly. It's surprisingly easy at times to do. Oops, I just gave away the secret, now people will know I'm not awesome.

hyperme wrote:
But if you think that UU will have a drastic shift in the way rooms are designed, or that UU is now required to be competitive, you've have effective assumed that a significant portion of the DROD player based is going to switch to UU and destroy puzzles forever, despite the fact there is no evidence for such a thing.

I've never said drastic... the shift will be subtle. It's not a complete jump of the game space to new territory, it will be a shift of the centre, with much of the same still there, and the changes will be to the fringe cases. And it will happen, because UU is powerful. It changes how people can play in a substantial way that allows them to do more with less frustration... all the arguments for it say it will, and that will always result in changes to what sort of rooms are considered playable to people (we've seen comments to this regard in the thread too from architects). Plus there's the checkpoint thing... checkpoint science is really undeveloped and tricky (also covered in this thread). UU doesn't exactly encourage that science to develop so much as it allows for looser consideration. This can be both good and bad (ie you don't have to put a checkpoint exactly where it might give something away, you can better afford to put it off to the side where it's still available for casual play, counting on people that are serious about optimizing the room to not have to worry about that).

And it will pretty much be required to be competitive. UU is a great tool for optimizing. It will allow more people to optimize more rooms more effectively. It doesn't really change the optimizing game, but not using it is certainly a handicap. For example, UU gives a definite advantage in testing and retrying sections in rooms with lousy checkpoints and that take a lot of turns. You can go without it, but that will be a handicap.

hyperme wrote:
also one step undo is terrible because drod is chaotic i already <3 three step because i don't get screwed over by unpredictable tar growth anymore.

I suggest you play some tar rooms with zero undo then. Tar growth is one of the most predictable things... there's no chaos to it, it just requires the ability to see through the tar growth. Which is a mental skill like seeing under the stones in Go or Reversi. You need to train it, not accomidate it. Save the multiple undo for real chaos.

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Chaco wrote:

Banjooie wrote:
Like maybe this is going to ruin the optimizing game forever? But as I recall you guys were running programs to automatically replugin X moves into the game as it was.

Probably not. I mean, yeah, people were using those programs on rooms like Lunchbreak Special : Inside the Dungeon : 3 South, 5 West and ...

hey!

If people are using move-recorders for that room then move recorders are clearly not that helpful. There are only 3 people with high scores, and I'm pretty certain I was doing it the long way.

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bwross wrote:
Plus there's the checkpoint thing... checkpoint science is really undeveloped and tricky (also covered in this thread). UU doesn't exactly encourage that science to develop so much

Checkpoints were added in Architect's Edition. In 2003. When veteran architects still sometimes struggle with checkpoint placement 11 years later, it's time to accept that science is just not going to develop to the degree of artistry necessary to provide the kind of grief avoidance players want. Soon the focus will shift, and we'll tell players to add checkpoints so that players don't have to dive for the undo key when they die, and so they don't have to undo huge amounts of moves at a time. And the best way to do this will be to checkpoint at sensible locations between sections of puzzle or progress. Really, I don't expect much change in how we checkpoint - only in how critical to enjoyment it is that the architect master it.

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skell
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bwross wrote:

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skell wrote: taste.

Is it really "solving" a room if you get to the end and have a frankenreplay that's so stitched together than you can't recognize it. It already happens a bit with checkpoints.

I disagree wholeheartedly. There is no 'good' or 'bad' solving as long as you have fun. And if you really need to differentiate between the two, then I think the problem lies somewhere completely else and has less to do with UU and more about... I don't even know what.

It's not about "good" or "bad", it's about what is.

Sorry, I misunderstood your initial comment. I'm dropping out of the discussion now, I think I pretty much said all I wanted and other are better at English and can make finer points. Suffice to say I while I appreciate and respect your enlightening responses bwross, I still disagree with most of things you said .

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stigant
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I'm pro-UU. I'm 37, so I'm not ancient, but I've played rogue-likes where undo doesn't makes sense because randomness. DROD has no randomness, so the analogy doesn't extend here.

I don't think UU is going to help you brute-force anything. First of all, 11^N grows too quickly. Even if you prune down to 2^N (which is approximately the lower limit of complexity that you would consider brute forcing since anything simpler doesn't even need that), how do you propose to keep a stack of more than 10 or so ply in your head? That's not meant to be derisive or dismissive... I'm honestly curious. I would love to see a LP of someone turning off their solving brain and brute forcing any part of any room that takes more than 20 moves (and has a narrow enough solving path that you can't just luck into a valid solution).

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Moo
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But sometimes you don't want to brute force a sequence of 8 11-choice moves, you may need to only do 2 "moves" with maybe 6 possible choices each time... That would be made much easier with UU, perhaps meaning any "thinking" is no longer necessary. But that kind of small-scale brute-forcing is already feasible without UU, especially if there's good checkpoints, so UU doesn't change that much.

The thing is, that kind of guesswork is already necessary in quite a lot of rooms, I find (perhaps because I'm not a good player)... Having to repeat sections to try something else doesn't make it more difficult, it just makes it more time-consuming and frustrating. Even FDROD-style 3-move undo makes a big difference to that.

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Honestly I'm one of the largest anti-UU players and even I don't really believe it's going to ruin DROD.

Yeah, I have fond memories of sweating tar because you only get one undo rather than two (so you have to know how it will form babies to take a safe stance--one undo won't save you). But UU will give me different options which will make for other fond memories.

Fond memories of horrible, horrible puzzles, which no doubt will continue to be the blessed bane of my existence. DROD is still intricate and awfully hard and I forgive all of you UU-supporting bastards for your heresy. Not so much the apostasy, but at least the heresy.

Either way I'm 98% sure nobody will give a crap once the fifth engine is out. Were I on the dev side I probably would have favored a capped undo like 5 moves, but anything that makes the game easier for n00bs without destroying it completely is probably a good thing.

(Which is one of the reason I'm simplifying the Angband keyset for my pony mod, for one example. Such sacrilege!)

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mrimer wrote:
* Also, it's interesting to me that bwross said he would be tempted to use UU once it's an option in the game. When one is "tempted," it implies they acknowledge there's something positive, in some certain respect, in the choice, and those positives must be weighed against the negatives. If something had no visible positives, it wouldn't be a temptation, after all.

Positive isn't exacty the word I'd use. Temptation requires desirablity, but that can still be for things that are negative and bad (people are weird). Temptation can sometimes include hope... it's easy to hope that giving into temptation gives you a certain positive for at least a while before the negatives overwhelm it, but you might not even get that positive or it might be very shortlived. And certainly, if the outcome was in ever favour of the positive, we wouldn't be talking temptation anymore.

mrimer wrote:
* With UU in use, checkpoints are still useful. They provide visual/spatial markers for instantly undoing sets of moves back to semantically distinct points in time/room state. UU can't provide those instant jumps to known positions/game states.

Certainly. I get frustrated when an architect doesn't place checkpoints in empty rooms. I find those good for bookkeeping.

But again, checkpoint science is weak, and it's likely to stay so, because it's hard to do. Players can't depend on checkpoints being in useful spots unless they're able to place them themselves. And UU gives a version of that (if not a convenient bookmark)... it works better for that if there is redo as well (because in practice, rewinding things often results in overshooting).

Watching Alex's recent replay of the Oremite Breeding Grounds reminded me of one of the largest checkpointing weaknesses: rooms with dialogue at the start, but no checkpoint to tag near the entrance... because if you want to talk frustration, it's having to hear the same line said the same way again and again in a room that's giving you some difficultly getting started. That can result in broken space bars.

stignant wrote:
I don't think UU is going to help you brute-force anything. First of all, 11^N grows too quickly. Even if you prune down to 2^N (which is approximately the lower limit of complexity that you would consider brute forcing since anything simpler doesn't even need that), how do you propose to keep a stack of more than 10 or so ply in your head?

The branching factor can be lower than 2 and still be complex... it just needs enough forced sections in the tree to lower the average (the granularity of DROD definitely allows for this). But if you shrink those out, to reduce it to a shrubbery of just the choice nodes, then, yes, branching factor will be at least 2. As for maintaining a stack, UU is that stack... that is definitely a benefit of it here. But even with single undo, you can do pretty well with iterative deepening methods combined with some depth first searching when you've made some obvious progress. Because it isn't about doing a complete brute force of the entire tree... you just need a solution, and often you can best get to one, not with a complete search, but with a combination of a short complete search followed by focusing on the most promising looking things (this is why Alpha-Beta can work so well with iterative deepening... it's not immediately obvious that doing many searches of increasing ply is better than just going for a deep ply search, but the ability to use information from the quick lower ply searches to sort the choices makes Alpha-Beta able to prune a lot more, so it's easy to get an extra ply from it that way). And, as Moo pointed out, there's often a breaking point, where once you hit it everything just clicks afterwards.

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[Last edited by bwross at 06-17-2014 08:55 AM]

stigant
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UU is that stack

It's not though... UU allows you to move back up the stack without having to reconstruct it sequentially from a checkpoint, but going down a different branch requires you to keep track of the moves that you haven't undone (in case you undo them later and then have to try a new move). UU doesn't help you with that. Try it... I don't think it will be as easy as you think.

EDIT:
The first level is pretty easy. The second level is more complex. I don't think I could keep 3 levels in my head, but there are smarter people than I. Being able to keep 10+ levels straight will probably put you in the elite levels of Chess and Go grandmasters.

EDIT2:
In fact, I'd be willing to be that it's actually easier to do trial and error WITHOUT using UU if you're less than 20 moves from a checkpoint since you'll be memorizing the stack by doing it over and over.

____________________________
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[Last edited by stigant at 06-17-2014 02:42 PM]

Moo
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Yeah, even with UU I've had the problem of I've "rewound" to a previous point to try something different, then have wanted to go "forward" to one of my attempts that seemed to work better, but can't remember how I did it...

The Architest
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Trickster wrote:
Were I on the dev side I probably would have favored a capped undo like 5 moves, but anything that makes the game easier for n00bs without destroying it completely is probably a good thing.

If I remember correctly, you can customize freely how many turns you can undo.

So you got that, kind of.

Trickster
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The Architest wrote:

Trickster wrote:
Were I on the dev side I probably would have favored a capped undo like 5 moves, but anything that makes the game easier for n00bs without destroying it completely is probably a good thing.

If I remember correctly, you can customize freely how many turns you can undo.

So you got that, kind of.

I can count to 5, so I'm covered already.

____________________________
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[Last edited by Trickster at 06-17-2014 10:40 PM]

bwross
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stigant wrote:

UU is that stack

It's not though... UU allows you to move back up the stack without having to reconstruct it sequentially from a checkpoint, but going down a different branch requires you to keep track of the moves that you haven't undone (in case you undo them later and then have to try a new move). UU doesn't help you with that. Try it... I don't think it will be as easy as you think.

If you're always making lists so you can redo things to try new things on old branches, you're not using a stack approach to any extent, but just tree wandering. A full stack based approach doesn't need more the move push/undo pop, because when you pop backwards, you see what was last pushed at that level, and then push the next thing, knowing that you'll never have to deal with that old branch again. But as I stated above, I don't use a full approach... I skip less promising branches in the first pass hoping for a quick solution, and pick them up on later passes if needed. But I still wouldn't have to keep track of anything on the side with UU, because it can be systematically done the same, only with pruning. Right now, with single undo, I do have to remember the stack like you say, which does put real limits on how far the systematic part can go before it turns to little more than trial and error. Which is a good encouragement to give up on this sort of search method when there's the possibility of getting the solution through reasoning. Again, the fact that UU removes frustation, means that more can be applied. So it allows for puzzles that require more depth in this area to be more feasible for people to solve. A power so great it can only be used for Good or Evil! Very dangerous, yo!

An electronic aid that allows me to push and pop moves on a stack would definitely help my Chess and Go game... my mind is lousy with keeping both what move sequence I'm considering and what the board will look like together in my head. Take that junk out of my head and I'll be able to concentrate more on remembering results (which I often forget and then have to redo the branch), so if I do give up because I'm tired of thinking and make a rash move, it will probably be one that I at least remember things about the consequences.

The Architest
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Trickster wrote:
I can count to 5, so I'm covered already.

Well, if you want to do it the hard way!

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[Last edited by The Architest at 06-18-2014 08:41 AM]