alt Hacker NewsHaha mine bounced around a bit until they managed to get stuck on eachother right in the middle
It’d be fun to see a line graph mapping the change in score over time - I wonder what the wave function would simplify to? Would it be a sine wave? Or more of a saw, as one side snowballs ahead, then the other inevitably ramps up to recover?
It’d also be cool to save the board state on each step, to find what the board looked like when each side was farthest ahead of the other, and when they were equal - and to play back the entire profession at super speed. Would it look like slime mold pulsing, expanding and contracting? Would there be swirls of white cutting into black and vice versa?
They got stuck for me as well. It reminds me a bit of the card game War, which has a similar zero-sum (and zero-choice) competition for a single resource that can take an extremely long time to complete, but without an equivalent for the mechanic for how to handle when the players play the same card. Maybe some sort of RNG is needed to break out of those stalemates, unless there's some sort of metaphorical lesson intended (like War Games, which despite the naming doesn't have much to do with the card game, but it does feature Tic Tac Toe prominently).