Difference between revisions of "Talk:Strategic advice from KataHex"

Revision as of 16:49, 5 August 2023

Great update! My suggestion would be to avoid recycling terms such as "efficient" and "useless triangle", even if this is how you call these concepts in your mind. It can only lead to confusion down the road if different people adopt the same terms to mean different things. How about "strong" or "influential" or "effective" instead of "efficient"? And I'm not sure where the triangle metaphor comes from; does that concept necessarily need its own name? Selinger (talk) 14:36, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

regarding "useless triangle": ​ That content is already covered by the Dead Cell article. ​ ​ ​ regarding "efficient": ​ Another option is coming up with a different term or phrase for what's currently in the Efficiency article, though I can't yet think of one. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Demer (talk) 04:00, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I think of pattern B1 in my article as a "useless triangle" because the 3 red stones are really inefficiently placed. Perhaps "wasteful triangle" is more accurate. Regarding "efficient": To be honest, I think it's slightly odd for "efficiency" to refer to the theoretical notion in the Efficiency article. (For example, it's strange that "efficiency" of a template is proportional to the number of moves, instead of inversely proportional. The more moves something takes, the less efficient it is.) It's hard to think of a word other than "efficient" that exactly captures the notion I'm referring to in my article. Maybe "coherent" or "harmonious"? Hexanna (talk) 00:47, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

The "useless triangle" part of my comment was referring to, we could get rid of that article. ​ (presumably by redirecting it to https://www.hexwiki.net/index.php/Dead_cell#Examples) ​ ​ ​ Also, maybe ​ "Speed of wins" ​ could be the new title for the Efficiency article. ​ This would of course require some changes to that article's phrasing, but I could try putting a proposal on my talk page. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Demer (talk) 12:02, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

@Demer: I don't think it's a good idea to change existing terminology unless there is a really compelling reason. The concept of "useless triangle" did not originate on HexWiki; for example, I am pretty sure it's in Cameron Browne's book. It also appears in historical (now outdated) strategy advice articles, before the whole theory of capture etc was developed. The triangle in B1 and B2 is not in fact useless, and whether it's wasteful depends on how it came about. It's quite common to get such triangles in the endgame simply because the opponent intrudes into various connections that were originally not wasteful but must be defended. But perhaps "wasteful triangle" is a fine name nonetheless.

In the efficiency article, efficiency refers to the idea of doing something with fewer moves. So counting the number of required moves seems to me like a good way to measure it. I agree that this leads to a situation where a larger number of moves means less efficiency. The article actually says "Smaller numbers are more efficient." I don't see any fundamental difficulty there. If the postal service takes 3 days to deliver my mail, it is less efficient than if they take 1 day to do it. One could define the efficiency of a connection to be the negative of the required number of moves, so that the ziggurat would have an efficiency of -3, but I don't think this would be more intuitive. Calling the number of required moves the "inefficiency". It would just lead to more double negations (finding the least inefficient connection, etc), without adding clarity.

"Coherent" or "harmonious" seem reasonable choices; perhaps also something like "balanced"? Selinger (talk) 16:49, 5 August 2023 (UTC)