h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

More fun than my flame pit idea (now long since abandoned...)

(A494309)

I thought it was cute to have a randomizing mechanic already built into almost any message board.

Flame Pit idea is nice, but would be used to best effect only by breaking current House Rules. Oh well.

One thing did occur to me, just now: the 'reduction' method is the same as dividing the number by 9 and looking at the remainder (except instead of 0 you get 9).

Here's a possibly more 'random' solution: say you have 4683 to reduce. Take '3', double it and add '8' (to get 14), reduce 14 to 5, double 5 and add 6 to get 16, reduce 16 to 7, double 7 and add 4 to get 18, reduce 18 to 9. So the final score is 9.

Just off the top of my head, but it looks reasonably easy to work out, without having the shortcut of straight reduction. Not necessary on all boards, but might be safer on some...

-Martin

Is there a smiley?

I would be really jealous that you reduced the only grain of coolness or originality in that game down to one step... except that it apparently took you two months to think of it. (Judging by the gap in posts on this thread.)

My only comfort is that I recall Fox Muldur saying, "Nobody likes a math geek, Scully."

Actually I was afraid people would avoid using the game mechanic because it would take some of them too long to perform the reduction on each post of the game. Your suggestion looks like it would extra steps that would take them even longer to figure. Even using the simpler step of dividing the number by nine and using the remainder would annoy most people. "Hey, everybody! Let's practice our long division!" None of this is as easy as I thought.

Thanks for bringing it up, though. It's nice to think that one's entries occasionally get read a month or two after one forgets all about them.

Well, "undead followers" was topical these last couple days.

How about just using the least significant number of the posting number then? so, you just scored a '9' from '2543639'. And if people abuse that by trying to time their posts... well best of luck to them!

...Maybe not read a month or two later, but at least thought about a month or two later.

Just for compleateness...... (12th of feburary, 2004!)

What are you completing?

Btw, you rolled a zero.