Introduction: Games are distant childhood memories, everyone's childhood and the childhood of human society. When the world is dominated by efficiency and profit, games are invented to soothe our overly tight nerves and touch our overly tired hearts. Mind games seem to outsiders as a mysterious, boring abstract world, but in the eyes of the player, they are like a garden with a bifurcated path. Remember what mind games we played in those years?
Author: Wang Ye
Photo by Suri
Rubik's Cube • Number of Gods
In a small Rubik's Cube, there are many limits that humans cannot explore. How many steps does a third-order Rubik's Cube have to turn to ensure recovery from any state? This number of least steps is jokingly called "God's number" by mathematicians. The third-order Rubik's Cube has a total of about 432.5 billion initial states, excluding the same state at different angles and perfect symmetry in the mirror, this figure is still as high as 4.5 billion. How to come to the least step conclusion that is absolutely true in the 4.5 billion state, scientists have tried all kinds of ways.
The first is the discovery of the German mathematician Koshepba in 1992 that the Rubik's Cube can form nearly 20 billion color combinations after some basic rotation. Three years later, American Reed calculated that it would take up to 12 steps to reach the 20 billion combinations, and to restore the 20 billion combinations would take up to 18 turns. 30, therefore, is the original estimate of the "number of God." In the 12 years that followed, people followed the same approach to advance the results to 26. In 2008, computer master Rokic magnified the 20 billion intermediate search range by thousands of times, and successfully compressed the "number of gods" to 22.
There is doubt that this is still not the end. In the past ten years of research, scientists have never encountered any situation that requires more than 20 turns to recover, at the same time, people have found tens of thousands of states, which must be restored with 20 turns, perhaps 20 is the final answer to the "number of gods", the mystery is still to be solved.
The Rubik's Cube uses a clever physical structure to connect many small cubes into a large cube that can arbitrarily disrupt each other's order, and the process of restoring the Rubik's Cube is like reordering a set of three-dimensional cipher symbols.
Chen Danyang is a leading figure in the Rubik's Cube master circle, and a group of young people in China represented by him are trying to refresh various Rubik's Cube world records.
Zhang Luchen was training on the blind twisting of the Rubik's Cube. Today's world's third-order blind twist record was set by Chinese Zhuang Haiyan, with a score of 35.96 seconds.
Photo: Li Hao
Catan Island • Virtual Experience
People have always pursued "living elsewhere", and before the advent of computers and online games, table games explored this possibility most diligently. Traditional intellectual games require people to restore the experience through imagination in the process of abstraction, while table games are guided by realistic experiences, making people can't help but rack their brains.
The experience created by table games is divided into two categories: character-based and situational. The most classic representation of a character-based experience is a killing game. In daily life, you simply do not have the opportunity to assume the responsibility of discerning, and you do not dare to be a bad person, a game for you to realize the dream of identity crossing. Of course, evil is not within the scope of character simulation, and the killer mainly experiences the nervous fear of being suspected and tracked after killing. Cover-up, deceive, and use all kinds of conspiracies and tricks to protect themselves and avoid elimination can also be forgiven in the role-playing table games.
Situational tabletop games are primarily about creating a virtual environment where you can unleash your talents for the ambitious. Some of the most classic scenarios in table games are – building a frontier, running a city or country; reenacting history and directing a battle that took place in reality; negotiating a deal to complete a business mission; virtually socializing, participating in an election.
Catan is the star of the simulated construction board game, and the player builds a city on the island, and the one who expands the fastest wins.
Sudoku • Fun of Reasoning
People often mistakenly classify Sudoku as a mathematical game, but it has nothing to do with mathematical operations. In principle, its close relatives are crossword puzzles and Latin squares, but the conditions and rules vary. Replacing the numbers in Sudoku with letters holds the same question, because Sudoku is a game that relies solely on logical reasoning. Advanced Sudoku problems in the reasoning process, need to use some specific solution formations, but also do not need to operate, as long as the formation into the problem, according to the number dependencies it provides to assist reasoning.
There are some accidentally created Sudoku problems, verified by computer programs, with all the solutions known at the moment can only be carried out to a certain step, and then only rely on guessing and trying to complete. At the same time, these problems have 100% unique solutions. They have become the supreme challenge for a small number of enthusiasts. "Theoretically, if the forward logic holds and there is a unique solution, the reverse logic must also be able to hold. We can't solve those problems, but we haven't found enough rules yet! "Sudoku enthusiasts are convinced of this.
People have studied Sudoku for 25 years, and there are only more than 30 advanced solutions, and the pace of advancement is so difficult and slow, but it does not hurt the enthusiasm of the explorers.
In Chen Cen's eyes, Sudoku is like a Sherlock Holmes story, full of ups and downs and full of reasoning.
Go • Rules of Human Nature
Among all the chess types, Go can be said to be the most "humane" one. A chess board has 64 grids with 30 regular moves per move, while Go has 361 points and more than 300 variations per hand.
The rules of chess rely heavily on logic, the chess pieces have different identities, different skills, and the value is easy to measure, while the world of Go is full of ambiguous areas, the pieces are the same, the relationship between the position of a single piece and the overall situation can be large or small, incalculable; the temporary power gap on the chessboard may not be related to victory or defeat, and the situation cannot be judged immediately; although the winning or losing judgment at the end of the chess game depends on the number of gaps, there is no clear termination condition, whether it is exhausted or a breath, and the victory or defeat is one heart. There is no insight into the process and no idea when it will end.
The line of Go relies on intuition and imagination, aesthetics and personality play a great role, and logic is only used to escort. The choice of each step of the masters is not the optimal solution of the logical operation, but the immediate conclusion of the brain's fuzzy search.
Qinqi calligraphy and painting are the traditional Four Arts of China, and in ancient texts, the description of the game of Go is far more than the exploration of skill. Master Rushan is a guqin teacher, and his skills in Go are also quite profound, and he often gets together with friends to compete. Photo: Li Hao
The key to playing Go is to have a big picture view, regardless of the length of a day, and not to argue about the gains and losses of one place.
Luban lock
Luban lock is also called "six sons lianfang", it is composed of six pieces of wood with concave and convex wood strips in the middle of each other bite each other, in the process of splicing, the last put in a wooden strip can "lock" the entire three-dimensional structure, making it stable. It has been found that its structure is similar to the tenon structure in Chinese architecture and furniture.
Written by Tang Yunzhou and published in 1895, the "Illustration of Chinese and Foreign Jurisprudence" records the solution of Lu Ban Lock in detail. This book and this Luban lock from the Qing Dynasty are both collectibles by Zhang Wei and Peter Lei.
Huarong Road
The origins of Huarong Dao are various, although it borrows a classic Three Kingdoms story, and its true history may not be more than a hundred years old. In principle, its originator is likely to be the rearrangement of the Nine Palaces game during the Tang Dynasty. After the 20th century, similar slider maze games have had many versions and variants around the world. The wooden Huarong Road in the picture was probably produced around 1930.
Zhang Wei and Peter Ray Collection Photo by Niana Liu Liu Nian
Qiao Ring
Zhang Wei and Peter Ray found these various forms of qiao rings from suzhou artist Ruan Genquan. They come from the deformation of nine consecutive rings, using the principle of topology in mathematics to entangle a ring or long handle with some geometric ring that is connected to each other. Knowing the mysteries of the nine rings, any strange ring can be easily solved.
Photo by Niana Liu Liu Nian
tangram
Tangram is typical of "Made in China". Tangram evolved from the Tang Dynasty's Yanji, originally an indoor game of the literati, and later evolved into a puzzle board toy in the folk, which spread out of China around the 18th century and quickly swept the world. The American writer Edgar Allan Pot once refined a tangram with ivory, and Napoleon of France also used the tangram as a pastime in his exile life.
Puzzle board
Puzzle boards are also typical of "Created in China". The Qing Dynasty scholar Tong Ye Geng expanded the tangram board to 15 tricks, that is, puzzle boards. Using these simple geometric figures, one can combine artifacts, landscapes, animals, and different forms of figures.
hopscotch
Like the simplest and oldest "hopscotch", traditional games will continue to circulate, and new games will draw inspiration from them endlessly.
Courtesy photo: CORBIS
Tigers eat small children
Some simple board games are widely used in rural northern China. After work, people will occasionally get together to fight a plate with stones or dirt blocks, and the "tiger eats children" played by the two elderly people is one of the most popular ones.