I have been independently recommended this game by three sources within 24 hours, so yeah I’ll play it.
I highly recommend well-facilitated Zendo for “training” and fun; this seems like it probably hits the same notes. Stretch goal: be as efficient as possible, attempting to learn the sorts of rules the creator would make and using those priors to win unreasonably effectively. I have no idea if that will work in Understanding, having not yet played, but if several people play Zendo together and get good at it (and don’t try to change their “GMing” based on the fact that people will try to model the creators), you can see some absolute magic happen as folks guess rules correctly with ridiculously small amounts of data.
I’ve only played Zendo once. As I understand it, there are are a small number of pieces to make rules about, while rules can be arbitrarily complex. So in this situation you could indeed get better at modeling your fellow players and become more efficient at winning.
In that perspective, playing Understand is a bit like playing Zendo against the game’s designer, who has hand-crafted ~130 levels (rulesets) à 5-10 screens (koans), though you’re not only trying to guess the rules but also to draw paths on each screen which satisfy them. Anyway, this means that the levels are a finite resource. So to me efficiency doesn’t quite seem like the right goal for playing the game.
In a spirit of deliberate practice, I think to get the most practice of rationalist techniques out of Understand, one might:
early on, try to understand all the subtle ways in which the game gives you feedback or evidence
in each level, try to discover the rules while doing as little experimentation (drawing paths) as possible, as if doing each experiment was expensive
try to notice sensations like confusion or surprise, which can give valuable information regarding fruitful hypotheses to pursue
keep play sessions relatively short, since practice sessions presumably hit diminishing returns at some point
And so on.
Conversely, if you’re sure you’ve correctly identified the rules of a level, and nonetheless find a few screens unsolvably difficult, from the POV of deliberately practicing rationalist techniques I see little reason not to ask for hints or outright look up solutions for these screens. I like puzzle games and mostly enjoyed that part, too; but that’s not why I recommended the game here.
Oh, yall play zendo with custom rules? In auckland EA we just played it random rules generated by the game, and that was interesting enough. It’s humbling to be holding one of the simplest possible rules and watch some of the brightest people you know generating epicycles and missing it for 20 minutes.
The newest versions come with ways to generate random rules. This brings the floor of the experience way up but also brings the ceiling down somewhat. “Oops I guess the rule I made was terrible” was a big problem with the original and newcomers.
I have been independently recommended this game by three sources within 24 hours, so yeah I’ll play it.
I highly recommend well-facilitated Zendo for “training” and fun; this seems like it probably hits the same notes. Stretch goal: be as efficient as possible, attempting to learn the sorts of rules the creator would make and using those priors to win unreasonably effectively. I have no idea if that will work in Understanding, having not yet played, but if several people play Zendo together and get good at it (and don’t try to change their “GMing” based on the fact that people will try to model the creators), you can see some absolute magic happen as folks guess rules correctly with ridiculously small amounts of data.
I’ve only played Zendo once. As I understand it, there are are a small number of pieces to make rules about, while rules can be arbitrarily complex. So in this situation you could indeed get better at modeling your fellow players and become more efficient at winning.
In that perspective, playing Understand is a bit like playing Zendo against the game’s designer, who has hand-crafted ~130 levels (rulesets) à 5-10 screens (koans), though you’re not only trying to guess the rules but also to draw paths on each screen which satisfy them. Anyway, this means that the levels are a finite resource. So to me efficiency doesn’t quite seem like the right goal for playing the game.
In a spirit of deliberate practice, I think to get the most practice of rationalist techniques out of Understand, one might:
early on, try to understand all the subtle ways in which the game gives you feedback or evidence
in each level, try to discover the rules while doing as little experimentation (drawing paths) as possible, as if doing each experiment was expensive
try to notice sensations like confusion or surprise, which can give valuable information regarding fruitful hypotheses to pursue
keep play sessions relatively short, since practice sessions presumably hit diminishing returns at some point
And so on.
Conversely, if you’re sure you’ve correctly identified the rules of a level, and nonetheless find a few screens unsolvably difficult, from the POV of deliberately practicing rationalist techniques I see little reason not to ask for hints or outright look up solutions for these screens. I like puzzle games and mostly enjoyed that part, too; but that’s not why I recommended the game here.
Oh, yall play zendo with custom rules? In auckland EA we just played it random rules generated by the game, and that was interesting enough. It’s humbling to be holding one of the simplest possible rules and watch some of the brightest people you know generating epicycles and missing it for 20 minutes.
The newest versions come with ways to generate random rules. This brings the floor of the experience way up but also brings the ceiling down somewhat. “Oops I guess the rule I made was terrible” was a big problem with the original and newcomers.