c4countdown

Simon Myers

Intriguing post, it's something I'd thought about doing myself once or twice, but never bothered to carry it out. I'm interested in the answers to Charlie's questions too. Although the data are quite sparse, it might be interesting to look at the first 28 of Rachel's numbers games versus the second ...

Simon Myers

I had 14/14 here against Junaid, including two nines. I got the conundrum instantly and pressed P, but, oh no, I'm locked out, Junaid buzzed on 0.7 seconds. Ridiculous. I'm counting this as a moral max game as I spotted PURCHASED instantly too but it won't ever be recorded :( http://www.apterous.or...

Simon Myers

Would it help at all if the selection could be made from the keyboard? Such as pressing a number which corresponds with the entry or arrow keys + enter key combination.

I think it would be ideal if the game could be played entirely with the keyboard anyway. Good ergonomics and such.

Simon Myers

I have played 24 speed conundrum attacks, totalling 480 possible attempts, at a cost of many minutes to my life, for a virtual egg. And failed. My Life Is Crap Dot Com http://mylifeiscrap.com/ If you want to keep trying, I suggest you play 3 second conundrum attacks (can be set up from the custom m...

Simon Myers

Innis Carson wrote:Anyone worked out the yellow egg yet? It's driving me insane.

Maybe

Needs some abstract thinking though.

Simon Myers

who's actually staying over at the hotel on Wednesday night? I'm staying in the hotel Wednesday night, as are my parents- so I may or may not meet up for drinks depending on what their plans are, and whether I need to be up early for a lift back to Uni. Anyone else? No response yet from Kirk, Charl...

Simon Myers

Pretty cool Charlie. I think I've figured out Blue and Red eggs already. Have a strong idea for Purple eggs too. I don't want to give the game away so soon though (plus, I might later want to attempt getting a complete set of eggs for myself), so I'll stay quiet.

Simon Myers

I should be home, so sure.

Simon Myers

Obviously I've failed...

Simon Myers

Not sure if this is just me, but at the moment when I try to play any classic game I get logged out with an error:

Error in InfoClientHandlerThread: java.io.IOException: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: net.MessageToServer$PlayClassicGame

Simon Myers

I won a duel!

Quite surprised given I missed some sitters (especially AUDITOR). I suppose learning the full STAINER stem paid off in getting REATTAINS.

Simon Myers

Woohoo, I can finally retire from speedgoat http://apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=42490 Slightly bizarre time to get it as if you look at the games prior to this you can see I was just half-arsing it waiting for my COMA game to start, then I realised half way throughI was on a perfect game and got ...

Simon Myers

Wow, ridiculously close to a max game there (how did she miss GLOATER?). I bet a lot of the better players here would turn in 15 maxes on this one. I suppose this game showcases the differences in shuffling back then compared to now. I think the main difference is the lack of repeated consonants and...

Simon Myers

Good to see the recaps for the octorun of the most successful female player of the modern era here in all their glory.

Charlie - do these recaps need cross-checking with an ODE for obscure maxes or has this been done already?

Simon Myers

Extra stats are always cool. I'm curious about how they're calculated though [EDIT - now I'm not, since I actually read the pages properly], since objectively there are multiple ways of measuring competence. My thoughts: In letters rounds you can simply take points scored, but that creates an enormo...

Simon Myers

Kirk Bevins wrote:
Kevin Davis wrote:Round Three: Some men can find it, you know.
Every time I see CLITORIS recently, ELICITORS is always there. No wonder I'm shit in bed...

Every time I see CLITORIS recently, my SOLICITOR is always there. I wish he'd stop following me around...

Simon Myers

Stephen has spoilt the master criminal look though with the amazingly quick beard growth (wow, not even a weekend for it ... he must get through some razor blades when he does shave) and smiling. It looks like he's still really nervous though. Not so amazingly quick; there was a gap of nearly a mon...

Simon Myers

Mike Brown wrote:as supplied by Art Director Demi Sampson during the Championship of Champions recordings in December 2008

He actually got them from Demi on the first day of Kirk's filming in January.

Simon Myers

Besides it'll be a pleasure to watch the most one-sided finals matches ever! :) Not if the Goughulator has anything to say about it... That's what I meant, he'll annihilate Kirk in the final ;) By the way, did those of you who went to see Kirk's show being recorded get a chance to speak to today's ...

Simon Myers

Marque for round 13. Or Barque, I think. Also is Sapiens allowed, in the penis round? And no disrespect meant, but if Kirk had been on today, I think Hazel Wheeler's record may have come under threat. (But maybe I'm being unfair, and it just seems that the contestant is worse than she actually is b...

Simon Myers

GRRRL for 5, maybe? Or is GRR in there? GRRRL is in (no GRR), but there's also GRRL. CYCLIC. Icy. The best I could come up with was QUICK. (Unless ICK is a word). I thought of MUUMUU as well, but umm, I don't think that's allowed. I think I'm right in saying that, as well as being longer, Syzygy is...

Simon Myers

Yeah this is where Kirk's poor real-world vocabulary let him down. He conflated ENSCONCED and ABSCONDED, and compounded by a persuasive scramble, buzzed too soon.

Simon Myers

Mark Kudlowski wrote:2nd numbers:
Also, was HOURLINES a possibility for Game 7 (?)

No, UNHOLIER the darren 8.

Simon Myers

Chris Davies wrote:
Kai Laddiman wrote:DOOMSTER
I got it too

Yeah I had DOOMSTER in the audience. Kirk was annoyed to miss that, because it was one of the words we'd specifically covered before he went on.

Simon Myers

I don't think Kirk knew PESSARIES. It's yet to come up on Apterous, even in Goatdown/Hyper.

Simon Myers

Countdown recap for Friday 25 October 2002. C1: Champion Julian Fell (7 wins, 786 points.) C2: Challenger Carl McDermott. DC: Susie Dent and Ingrid Tarrant. CV: Carol Vorderman. OT: Other words or solutions. R01: N C T U I S E M G R02: R V D O I L E A S R03: E L W I O S R D F R04: D C D E A M U O K ...

Simon Myers

I'll take one then.

Simon Myers

Really most top players would be getting over 95% generally speaking, it's the mistakes, really tough rounds and an opponent who can spot tricky maximums that knock the percentage down from there. I will admit that I kept a spreadsheet of my games against challenger and champion before I went on (I...

Simon Myers

Congrats on another win, Kirk! :) I'm rationing out watching the shows because of the break for the racing (bloomin' sport! :( ) BTW, did you get a break in recordings, or where they still all done in a couple of days? Not that I'm ever likely to be in the running for octochampdom, but playing so m...

Simon Myers

This calls for some statistical analysis of first-game-of-the-day performance by octochamps ;) . I think I'd be flagging after 6 games regardless of where the overnight break fell. I need a little lie down after a couple of competitive games on Apterous. Five real-life games in one day must take so...

Simon Myers

If I'm working this out right, Kirk's on 91.4% of max score so far for his run. Not far off getting yet another record. Also a lot of those dropped points come from missing ridiculous stuff like SANTONICA. As Gevin said, his total number of maxes is probably a record in itself. I'd have expected pe...

Simon Myers

Only spent a minute or two thinking about this, and I'm presuming you mean "what is the lowest such x?" In that case I suppose it's x^(number of rounds) > 0.5 So that for a nine round game, about 0.926 so that 0.926^9 = 0.50609. Or put into words, one would have to max ~93% of rounds to ma...

Simon Myers

Yes, barring any glaring omissions in Jimdic, that was a max game. EDIT: A bit of background info on that. As Charlie and I were sat in the studios we were aware that since Charlie nor DC had beaten Kirk on any rounds during the game, he might be on for a max. I checked all the selections with a2zwo...

Simon Myers

Sid Myers, the other half of Team Kirk. On here he's called Simon, a source of endless confusion. I wasn't at all confused until I read that post. :( <Boring off-topic explanatory information> Simon is my real name. Sid (Properly SiD - Si mon from D erwent [college]) is a darts nickname that has al...

Simon Myers

Jojo Apollo wrote:Kirk, I think you saw DOMINIE but for some reason didn't play it?

Nah, he was thinking of risking the phoney MINIONED^, which really would show off his poor vocabulary. Luckily for him, he didn't.

Simon Myers

I must admit that after seeing it on TV (much more so than when I was sat in the studio with Charlie), how effortless Kirk made it look to glide past the highest opening score.

Simon Myers

Martin Gardner wrote:Perculator? LMAO

Kirkulator might make more sense.

Simon Myers

Thanks for the recap and background info Tom, it made for an interesting read.

Tom wrote: Round 8: X D T B O U A R I

C1: ABORT (5)
C2: OUTBID (6)
DC: TURBID (6)
OT: AUDITOR (7)
Score: 53–59 (max 63)

Apterous' most missed word strikes again! (retrospectively)

Simon Myers

Didn't take too long to find another 9 round octochamp - Michael Calder in series 42 had not one but two tie-break conundrums in his run.

Simon Myers

Paul Howe wrote:Noone ever notices.

Another paradox, I presume?

Simon Myers

A sandwich is therefore a closed union of two slices joined via juxtaposition, potentially via some substrate ( filling ). Thus we have defined a sandwich No you haven't. You've defined a round of sandwiches. The sandwiches themselves only become defined by the action of cutting up the round. Once ...

Simon Myers

It seems that the problem of sandwich/sandwiches is a contentious issue. If we are careful we can easily see how this is actually a false dichotomy. Allow me to explain. I propose some sort of axiomatic sandwich theory from which we can build a unifying notion of what it means to be a sandwich. Sand...

Simon Myers

I think the update code for the "best pickers" (maxes and darrens) isn't doing its job properly. I've noticed I've been stuck on 80 rounds picked since it was introduced (I think). It probably should've gone up a bit after all those Aptobash games!

Simon Myers

If people want to finish this off any time, the outstanding games from Round 7 were CF vs Sid Lee Simmonds vs Dinos/Stitcher (whichever) If those get played then I can do the draw for Round 8 and we can polish it all off :) CF and I finished our game. He was leading by around 31-20 and then I start...

Simon Myers

Allan Harmer wrote: Score: 84–66 (max 99)

Round 14: 9, 5, 8, 10, 4, 25. Target: 616.

C1: 624.
C2: 612. 10+9+5=24X25+8+4 (7)
Score: 84–73 (max 106)

Is 616 the right numbers target? I didn't see the game but the numbers as given here is possible (and so the max should be corrected).
For example:
10/(8/4) x 5 x 25 - 9

Simon Myers

Could these be found automatically (by largest deficit before eventually winning, for example)? Probably expensive to compute though.

Simon Myers

Not sure if (or even if, how) this adds to the discussion, but I think (counterexample in 5, 4, 3...) any coin system using 1 and the first n (for any n>=0) prime numbers should always work in the greedy way (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 for n=4). Even if I'm right, prime numbers could well be a special case ...

Simon Myers

I wonder how well someone who just picked S every time would perform in the max picking. Looking at the stats here , perhaps not that well. In fact, S wasn't even clearly much better than L or R given the small sample of games. That has got me thinking - I had a game the other day where the first t...

Simon Myers

- best goatdown pickers Ta-dah and ta-dum ! I think this mainly reveals that the bots are way too good at picking. Very cool Charlie. I presume the darrenicity measure relates to the number of maxes available given your pick? So that with the two measures you can differentiate players like Rex (gre...

Simon Myers

- most missed/solved conundrums: The Raccoon and I have Big Plans for that so there will be something eventually. - numbers game player %maxes for the different formats and proportion of impossible numbers game by format: http://www.apterous.org/statland.php?section=numbers (I think that's what you...

Simon Myers

Great stuff Charlie, I love these kinds of stats. I'm sure there are some other good ones that can be added in future. If you're at all interested, off the top of my head I can think of (I know some of these may be unfeasible depending on what data mining you're doing / expensive database queries / ...

Simon Myers

Very nice. Perhaps some way of noting when the word was a max (when found by a player) or a darren max (when found by a player or noted by DC) would be interesting. I see that non-words (e.g. WANKIEST^) are displayed in the word search in the same way as real words. Should this be the case? As an as...

Simon Myers

Nice find. I find it amusing how in the comments someone tries to be a smart arse by giving the probability of the word COUNTDOWN coming up on the show, clearly ignoring the fact that there aren't an equal number of each letter in the tileset. Not only that but, if I'm right (and it is early in the ...

Simon Myers

Excellent game guys, particularly nice consistency throughout the game from Charlie. I found the conundrum quite amusing, since I remember telling Charlie, Kirk and Dinos on the train after COLin that it was one of the hardest conundrums I'd ever seen, after having noticed Kirk miss it in a game on ...

Simon Myers

No self-respecting shuffler could possibly sleep at night without making sure DXTSC and AIO are at the top of the letters packs at the start of round 1 every once in a while... any problems with insomnia lately, Demi?

Simon Myers

It's funny you should say that Charlie. Surely you must be mistaken, however, for I spent the whole day today with Kirk. Perhaps all that Box Pizza has gone to your head?

Simon Myers

Good game today, and well done to Charlie for avenging his earlier defeat. I actually had already guessed Charlie was going to be the victor of this one, because I took this game on apterous: http://apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=14795 to be a likely deciding game between the two of them (it's the o...

Simon Myers

I knew the word, but only became acquainted with it a couple of years ago as I don't drink coffee and the moderately affluent urbanites in our family call it a plunger. I think the vocabulary on the conundrums is generally fine, the last word I can remember being baffled by was the infamous Hansfor...

Simon Myers

Nice game today for my birthday. Saw OLEATES in one round but wasn't sure about it so stuck with TEASEL. That reminds me, I know it's picky, but shouldn't the contestant be asked to spell a word like TEASEL? Nah, I initiated this debate with some of the other contestants. There's some oddity with t...

Simon Myers

Letters mix was a little better today even though there were four letter Ss in one selection. Susie seemed to struggle to get much animation out of her sidekick.A couple of times she looked at him as though she thought he might have gone to sleep.I just hope that we will see some of the old favouri...

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