11/22: Class Notes

G2 submitted a fairly sparse board, benchmark, which has a few high scoring items
Daniel: This is interesting because it forces you to have to spread out
Lauren: Boards with few creatures are "easy" in that you have less creatures to find to maximize your score.

We computed that the maximum ideal dimension is 80, after which point you'll get stuck at the edges
Blake: Bigger R's shrink the board
Daniel: R=D is a sanity check
Lauren: Why not use 2 way communication with the isnork?
DFed: How do you do that without interference? Maybe you have some sync time where everyone agrees to give some sort of state update.
Daniel: We don't need to have people tell us what they need if they are instead telling us what they have seen
Flavio: But we may need to know the ID of the creature too, not just what it is
John: In a dangerous environment, a conga line makes sure that you know a safe path back to the boat
What happens if your conga line is interrupted?

Did we miss discussing anything?
John: Whether creatures are helpful or just provide a minimal benefit

We'll make a map with 5-10 of each creature, filling at least half of the cells (all benign, same happiness)

Zach: Use something like huffman coding to make important messages come out faster, and less important ones take longer

What features would we want to encode in the isnork?
John: Add a 27th letter, the null character
DFed: We need to know the radius at which you saw something

For Weds:
Some players that respond to the boards we saw today.
Be ready to talk about how you are going to use the isnork.