Board Game Sequence

Quixotic

Post the next step in the sequence:




I'm still working on a solution for this. As far as I see, the problem lies in discovering the rules of a game (I assume it is a game) that would produce such patterns in sequence.

Quixotic

No replies whatsoever, but I never did figure this one out. Anyone at all want to have a go?

davee123

I played around with it a bit, but I couldn't come up with anything useful. I went under the assumption that it was something similar to "life", but with different rules, but I couldn't find anything relevant with rules involving immediate neighbors. Could be something completely different, though.

DaveE

ƒ(x)

Will you tell us where this came from?

Quixotic

It comes from one of the many now defunct amateur "IQ tests" online. It's no longer available for that purpose.

Abzu

My take

Quixotic

Your method?

TheStatutoryApe

It seems to be a game in particular, which you have hinted at, running backwards. Standard enough looking corner play to deduce that much. I am having a bit of trouble though since I was guessing that the X's represented opposing pieces but the positions of the X's are not consistent while the black dots are. There does not seem to be evidence of any captures either.

Quixotic

To me it looks (visually) most like either a variant on John Conway's "Life" or something like Minesweeper, but, as you say, what we believe to be game pieces don't necessarily behave as such.

TheStatutoryApe

Ah, I guess then you were not hinting. It looks to me like Go. Particularly it looks like a diagram of corner play except progressing backwards and X's instead of white pieces. The structure makes sense. I can not figure out how to make the progression make sense though.

Oh.... I just noticed the pieces are in the boxs instead of on the intersections as they are in Go. Its been too long since I played.

Soca fo so

Looking at the first two steps, it kind of looks like this could be a variation on checkers with the pieces taking horizontally and vertically instead of diagonally but then I don't immediately see if this could be used to get to the third picture.

I assume this was similar to what you were thinking with your solution Abzu?

DaveC426913

Now that would be a funny game to write - organisms struggling to survive and multiply in a field of mines!

Maybe you could build some artillery to take down the gliders...

Soca fo so

Ah now I see, it's a variation on checkers where you can take horizontally, vertically, and diagonally.

Abzu

I think the players capture each others pieces by jumping over them, any direction. Something in the first 3 turns suggested that the dot is doing the first move every turn. The leftmost dot in the 4th turn was spared by the cross-player because he would have lost in turn 5 had he taken it.

Soca fo so

Yeah I think you're right. I was thinking that they might only be allowed to take once in each direction per turn.

Quixotic

Do you mind annotating the game's moves as you see them?

DaveC426913

Well, that would be giving the whole thing away, now wouldn't it? You've been given the key...