I liked this one a lot. In particular, I appreciate that it defied my expectations of a winning strategy: i.e., I couldn’t get an optimal or leaderboard-topping solution with the “throw a GBT at the problem, then iterate over possible inputs” approach which won the lasttwo games like this.
I think the Dark mana thing was a good sub-puzzle, and the fact that it was so soluble is a point in favor of that. It seemed a little unfair that it wasn’t directly useful in getting a good answer, but on reflection I consider that unfairness to be a valuable lesson about the real world: the most interesting and cleanly-solvable subproblem isn’t necessarily going to help you solve the main problem.
Huh. I kind of imagined it would be very important to understand Dark mana in order to e.g. assign elements to spells, and I don’t know how deeper analysis would have been possible without doing that.
To the extent that there was a specific ‘intended’ use for understanding Dark mana/trap for not doing so, it was this:
Dark heavily anticorrelates with Light.
Therefore, if you don’t know about Dark mana, spells that use Dark will naively appear to be stronger when Light is weak and weaker when Light is strong.
At the time of the scenario, though, both Dark and Light are low, and so if you haven’t figured out Dark you could get misled into assuming that the Dark-using spells are all strong because Light is low.
I liked this one a lot. In particular, I appreciate that it defied my expectations of a winning strategy: i.e., I couldn’t get an optimal or leaderboard-topping solution with the “throw a GBT at the problem, then iterate over possible inputs” approach which won the last two games like this.
I think the Dark mana thing was a good sub-puzzle, and the fact that it was so soluble is a point in favor of that. It seemed a little unfair that it wasn’t directly useful in getting a good answer, but on reflection I consider that unfairness to be a valuable lesson about the real world: the most interesting and cleanly-solvable subproblem isn’t necessarily going to help you solve the main problem.
Huh. I kind of imagined it would be very important to understand Dark mana in order to e.g. assign elements to spells, and I don’t know how deeper analysis would have been possible without doing that.
To the extent that there was a specific ‘intended’ use for understanding Dark mana/trap for not doing so, it was this:
Dark heavily anticorrelates with Light.
Therefore, if you don’t know about Dark mana, spells that use Dark will naively appear to be stronger when Light is weak and weaker when Light is strong.
At the time of the scenario, though, both Dark and Light are low, and so if you haven’t figured out Dark you could get misled into assuming that the Dark-using spells are all strong because Light is low.