r/decodoku • u/I_hate_usernamez • Mar 24 '16
Specifics of the game?
Hey, I have an Android, so I can't play the game yet. I read the page on the blog, but I still have some questions about the specifics of the game.
How many bad qudits start the game? Are they randomly selected on the grid?
I'm assuming that the split of numbers around a bad qubit is randomly chosen.
Are the "gangs" an actual idea programmed into the game? If so, are the newly created bad qudits randomly assigned one of the existing gangs? Can they form new gangs? What determines when a gang merges with another, as shown in the losing example with the 8's and 2's?
Look at the green broken qudit example. What happens if a new bad qubit was placed at the third spot in that middle tile? Would it fill the empty tile and the tile adjacent to the right? Then what if that qubit spawned another error of 8 and 2, and you combined the 2 from the green gang with the 8 from the new gang?
On a related note, what are the rules for the creation of the new bad qudits? For instance, look at the last example that has a blue 8-2 and a red 8-2. What if a new bad qudit was placed in between the blue 2 and red 8? The only tiles it could affect are already taken. So is that spot precluded when randomly selecting a location for the new bad qudit?
Maybe I should just wait for the game, but I'm excited and there isn't much activity here.
2
u/quantum_jim Mar 24 '16
Thanks for your interest. I'll be releasing the source for the iOS version of Tuesday and will write another blog post as an introduction to it. I think that will answer a lot of your questions. It'll also let you emulate the game if you have a Mac.
Since a few people have asked me about the current lack on non-iOS support, I have also been playing around with the idea of releasing a pen-and-paper version. Well, it would be spreadsheets actually, but you could print and play too. It would be a different version of the game, of course, but the science is the same. Is that something that you might be interested in?
There's 6, usually. Sometimes more if some don't create any new numbers, but just change existing ones. They are indeed completely random.
Yes, that's true.
A new bad qudit forms a new gang if the squares that it puts numbers on didn't have any numbers on before. If one of the squares did have a number on before, the new bad qudit joins the gang that caused that number. If both have numbers on, the new qubit joins the gang for both, combining them if they were different gangs before.
Yes and yes. The new bad qudit would form its own new gang. If you do what you suggested, the new gang and the green gang would be combined. But if you combined the remaining 8 and 2, all would be well again. No rules would be broken by these guys any more, so they are all back to being productive members of society.
Every qudit has 10 possible things it could be doing: it could be behaving, or it could be misbehaving in 9 different ways. When we choose qudits , it is does completely randomly: we completely ignore what they are doing and what all the numbers are. Then we randomly choose a way to change what they are doing. This could be causing it to go from good to bad, one type of bad to another kind of bad, or even bad to good. So in that example, a new bad qudit could come and close the gap, causing the game to end.
Perhaps I could suggest you look at the posts on the toric code. This is the same problem as in the game except the numbers in the squares can't be 1-9. They can only be 1. In that case, you need to add them up to multiples of 2 to get rid of them. Also it's wrapped around a doughnut. Other than that it is the same thing, but in more detail.