A group for contestants and lovers of the Channel 4 game show 'Countdown'.
http://c4countdown.co.uk/
That already happens, except it's very difficult to do and the program can't always manage it, so you sometimes get random shuffles.Julian Fell wrote:IMHO priorities should be: sorting out the conundrums (making the scrambles into word-forms like on TV,
Yep.Julian Fell wrote:and having some way of making tournament conundrums be of an appropriate difficulty level) and having a challenge feature for disallowed words.
No chance, sorry -- the legal implications are too serious.Julian Fell wrote:Otherwise, as mentioned before Charlie, if there's some way of incorporating the clock music, that would be brilliant.
Not really (see other post.)Julian Fell wrote:Also is there any way Apterous could be connected to the (old-style text) recap writer, so that it writes those sorts of recaps automatically? Obviously the Wiki-style recaps are fine as a record of the game, but they're hard to 'play along' with, what with the contestants' offerings being shown right next to the selections.
Thanks!Julian Fell wrote:Anyway, it's a great site
How are the conundrums currently done? Are they just random nines jumbled randomly?Julian Fell wrote:IMHO priorities should be: sorting out the conundrums (making the scrambles into word-forms like on TV, and having some way of making tournament conundrums be of an appropriate difficulty level) and having a challenge feature for disallowed words.
Or maybe if that's giving too much to the cheapskate, you could just have a demo mode where you just get one round of each (letters, numbers and conundrum) or even a full game that's the same game every time - just something to let you practise the controls. In terms of drawing in a wider audience and getting donations from them, I think this would help matters.Gavin Chipper wrote:Fair enough if you want people to donate before they can play the robots, but it might be an idea to have an option to play completely on your own (against yourself so to speak) before committing any money. This is because it would be nice to try out the game before committing any money, but without the pressure of having to play someone miles better than you while simultaneously working out how to enter your solutions properly.
That's a pretty good idea. Prod me if I haven't done this in a week's time.Gavin Chipper wrote:you could just have a demo mode where you just get one round of each (letters, numbers and conundrum) or even a full game that's the same game every time - just something to let you practise the controls. In terms of drawing in a wider audience and getting donations from them, I think this would help matters.
For the blind Countdown you'd need this as well, otherwise someone can just pick all nine letters in three seconds and the other person can't see.Gavin Chipper wrote:How about a minimum time between selecting each letter? I like to write them down!
You answered your own question there mateGavin Chipper wrote:Is there any need to say how many letters the other person has declared while you decide? I know it's more "realistic"
The tactics of declaring first and second are important to learn, so it's worth reproducing.I will put some effort into making them slightly more interesting. Sometimes the shuffler comes up with real gems like FRONTRIBS (which I reused myself in Sfyris vs O'Donnell) and HEPATICAL. It's computationally hard though.Julian Fell wrote:The conundrums do need sorting out though Charlie - it seems to be most of the time that it's jumbled randomly.
It's just such a hassle to introduce a third person into the set up. There's so much crap you have to handle. What if the person setting the conundrum gets disconnected? What if they set an invalid conundrum, or one with several solutions, or not in the dictionary but maybe it's an error in jimdic so maybe we should allow it after all I don't know my head hurts now okay full stop.Julian Fell wrote:Perhaps have a feature whereby a third party - a human - can set the conundrum for tournament games? I know you don't like this whole human-intervention thing, but still...
The program does an internal coin toss to decide who goes first and who goes second. On MSN, the player who wins the toss chooses whether to go first or second, but since any sensible person would choose to go second, I don't think this is a major shortcoming. Which is not to say I won't add some feature where the players can choose, but it's not a priority.Julian Fell wrote:On the same lines, how is it decided who is C1 and who is C2 for tournament games? Do the players just agree beforehand? Could a 'coin-toss' function be built into the program? (I suppose you could always get an observer to do the 'coin-toss' via the chat window)
Yeah, I've been meaning to do this for ages, but I think you've finally ground me down to the point of doing it.Julian Fell wrote:Also: could you make it so that players can see what type of selection their opponent's chosen on numbers rounds, before the actual numbers start coming up? Would be more realistic, and would give you that crucial second or two to get psyched up knowing there's a 6 small or 4 large or whatever selection coming up... it's a bit rough when you don't get that IMHO.
I did this two or three days ago!Julian Fell wrote:separate chat windows for separate games
Yes yes, I will do it, but it's not as easy as it sounds.Julian Fell wrote: making old tournament games viewable by anyone, any time
I've been pondering this for a while. I think Susie should certainly tell you what the best pick was. I'm not sure whether that should affect the maximum. They're kinda two different things.Paul Howe wrote:Display the max score in Goatdown as the score with the optimal final letter pick? Actually maybe isn't a great idea because you only get to pick half the letters so you could be punished for the opponent's picking, and the optimal pick might not be the longest available word (if it's something dead easy to spot). I'll put it out there anyway...
I'm with you on this Karen. I have lost a few conundrums before, just because I tried to backspace and it is annoyingKaren Pearson wrote:The ability to backspace (just one place) on the conundrum without it being disallowed? I was typing in BLOODYING the other day and left my finger on the O for too long (i.e. blooo) and it registered as a mistake. In MSN, everyone would accept that as just a typo.
Thanks.
.That wouldn't be difficult to do, but I think I've come up with a better way. I will upload the new version some time later today -- check the front page for news.Karen Pearson wrote:Maybe you could allow just one correction in the numbers and just one backspace (not including deleting the first letter) on the conundrum. Knowing absolutely nothing about programming, that is probably very difficult to do - sorry!! Or an overall time limit for entering the whole solution.
Hmmm....Jon O'Neill wrote:It looks something like this:
Jono - REALLY FUCKING FAST!
Everyone else - not that fast.
) should stand.Oh yeah, I was meaning to do this. I will get around to it soon, I promise.Ben Pugh wrote:Could we have the list of fastest conundrums back?
Okay, I've done a lot of work on this today and it now works quite well (only about 5% of conundrums are now random junk, and those are things like DWINDLING where it's practically impossible to make anything.) Here are a few things it's set me:Charlie Reams wrote:I will put some effort into making them slightly more interesting. Sometimes the shuffler comes up with real gems like FRONTRIBS (which I reused myself in Sfyris vs O'Donnell) and HEPATICAL. It's computationally hard though.Julian Fell wrote:The conundrums do need sorting out though Charlie - it seems to be most of the time that it's jumbled randomly.
As Jesus said, "It is done."Charlie Reams wrote:Oh yeah, I was meaning to do this. I will get around to it soon, I promise.Ben Pugh wrote:Could we have the list of fastest conundrums back?
As Jesus said, "It is done." I don't think his was hyperlinked though.Charlie Reams wrote:Oh yeah, I was meaning to do this. I will get around to it soon, I promise.Ben Pugh wrote:Could we have the list of fastest conundrums back?
Thanks, this means we can all battle for second place behind Jon O'Neill/Jeffrey Hansford.Charlie Reams wrote:As Jesus said, "It is done." I don't think his was hyperlinked though.Charlie Reams wrote:Oh yeah, I was meaning to do this. I will get around to it soon, I promise.Ben Pugh wrote:Could we have the list of fastest conundrums back?
Whatever happened to our 'don't expose eachother as a fraud' Gentleman's agreement?Paul Howe wrote:Hmmm....Jon O'Neill wrote:It looks something like this:
Jono - REALLY FUCKING FAST!
Everyone else - not that fast.
http://www.apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=1718
If you're allowed to do that then I think my instantaneous one (literally clocked at 0ms in the database
http://www.apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=1355
Given this, does tournament Countdown (not that I play it but if I ever became good I might) have to conform to what happens to be the current format on television? Couldn't a system be adopted with an even number of each type of round? I know this isn't really a question for here in particular but a question for each tournament organiser, but even so I thought I'd mention it.Charlie Reams wrote:[any sensible person would choose to go second
A decision was very deliberately made against this. Far too many conundrums are soluble in less than the 2 or 3 seconds you'd have to allow people to start typing the answer.Gavin Chipper wrote:I think that the way of pressing the first letter of the conundrum to buzz does give an advantage to typing geeks who know their way around a keyboard. My suggestion would be to press space to buzz but then you still have to type the conundrum immediately afterwards, so you would have less time to do a Hansford than Hansford himself did.
Knock it all you want fella, but those genes have given me the gift of doing conundrums FASTER THAN SUPERMAN. And THE FLASH.Jon O'Neill wrote: Whatever happened to our 'don't expose eachother as a fraud' Gentleman's agreement?
Now I'm forced to reveal that you're the lovechild of Damian Eadie and Joyce Cansfield.
I had to do it mate. I had to do it.
Yes, you should be able to. Not sure what went wrong here. I'll look into it.Joseph Bolas wrote:I was playing a game with Dinos before and I ended the game by closing the page (the game was unfinished). Now I have done this before with the bots and I was able to resume the game after clicking on their name again, but this time I was unable to do this with the game that I was previously playing with Dinos and tought you could do it with human players too.
Therefore is there a way to save a game, if one person does have to end the game early?
Apologies to Dinos as well, as I genuinely thought we could resume the game we were playing.
OK, but I think 3/4 of a second would probably suffice.Charlie Reams wrote:A decision was very deliberately made against this. Far too many conundrums are soluble in less than the 2 or 3 seconds you'd have to allow people to start typing the answer.
*Prods*Charlie Reams wrote:That's a pretty good idea. Prod me if I haven't done this in a week's time.Gavin Chipper wrote:you could just have a demo mode where you just get one round of each (letters, numbers and conundrum) or even a full game that's the same game every time - just something to let you practise the controls. In terms of drawing in a wider audience and getting donations from them, I think this would help matters.
Thinking about this, even if you allow two seconds to start typing after hitting space, it's not two seconds for them to Hansford the answer - it's two seconds to Hansford the answer and then find the first letter. I think the crucial question is whether more people would lose the conundrum under your system because they don't know their way around a keyboard well enough or whether more people would lose under my system by being Hansforded. My hunch is that your system would produce more "false winners", and it could put off the non-geeks.Gavin Chipper wrote:OK, but I think 3/4 of a second would probably suffice.Charlie Reams wrote:A decision was very deliberately made against this. Far too many conundrums are soluble in less than the 2 or 3 seconds you'd have to allow people to start typing the answer.
Also for playing the bots if you're feeling unsociable.Gavin Chipper wrote:An invisible mode for those to want to look around but not play anyone without looking like they're avoiding anyone?
I think that's half the crucial question. The other half is which is worse. Personally, if I lost because I couldn't find the key fast enough, I'd just accept it as the nature of the beast and work to improve my keyboard skills. If I lost because the other person Hansforded, well, there's not much I can about that, which makes it much more annoying.Gavin Chipper wrote:Thinking about this, even if you allow two seconds to start typing after hitting space, it's not two seconds for them to Hansford the answer - it's two seconds to Hansford the answer and then find the first letter. I think the crucial question is whether more people would lose the conundrum under your system because they don't know their way around a keyboard well enough or whether more people would lose under my system by being Hansforded. My hunch is that your system would produce more "false winners", and it could put off the non-geeks.
Yeah I'll do that.Gavin Chipper wrote: Or as an alternative, you could have it so that you click on the first letter of the conundrum, like you do in the numbers games if you enter after the time has run out. In fact when I first played the game I thought that's what "press" might mean as opposed to "type" which is what I would have expected to see.
Yeah the difficulty gradient is a bit off (there's a huge gap between Prime and Plum, and not much difference between Prime and Rex.) That kind of thing is hard to tweak but I'm trying.Martin Gardner wrote:Perhaps more robots, although I'm not sure how easy this would be. I find the weakest robot is hilariously bad (like not getting 103 from numbers with 100 and 3 in them) while the second lowest one could probably score 800 (or at least 760) on the real show. How about those contestants that don't declare nothing every round, but miss the max virtually every round. This might encourage weaker players to donate.
The conundrums should already be in French, and it should weed out defective ones automatically, so if that's not happening then it's a bug.Martin Gardner wrote:I can probably make you a French conundrums dictionary - I'm aware that the conundrums don't use the same dictionary as the letters games, otherwise you'd get plurals and conundrums with more than one answer like DERATIONS. I'll get a friend to try and come up with a French conundrum dictionary over the weekend, if he's at home. I'm aware this interests basically nobody.
See aboveMartin Gardner wrote:Interesting thing about the second lowest bot it is is shit at conundrums, and I've managed to go up 100 points just be playing it at conundrum attack. It makes it a bit easy to go up like that (I beat it 130 - 10 in my first effort).
Humm, maybe. It's easy enough to set up any format you like, so I don't need to provide an exhaustive list. But that one looks reasonably different and interesting so I might add it as a pre-set.Martin Gardner wrote:Edit: I know what it was, a Masters mode LNCLNCLNCLNCLNC, which I played myself twice as a custom game today, which is really cool (see my games history)
You're not supposed to be able to backspace the first letter. I must've broken something.Jon Corby wrote:Ugh - I've just realised that you can backspace the first letter on the conundrum. I thought that you had a really ingenious solution to prevent people Hansfording, and you've removed it. Why? Allow backspacing if you must (why can't people just type carefully anyway, you get enough time?), but not the first letter
I thought it was hilariousJon Corby wrote:Apterous Rex is really mean and insulting. I got two 9s against him today, and he just says stuff like "that's the best you can hope for" rather than "well done".
It's not really me I'm concerned for, but Lee Bailey would have some kind of breakdown should he ever play him.
But the people who haven't donated wouldn't have known that had you not just told them!Martin Gardner wrote:Perhaps more robots, although I'm not sure how easy this would be. I find the weakest robot is hilariously bad (like not getting 103 from numbers with 100 and 3 in them) while the second lowest one could probably score 800 (or at least 760) on the real show. How about those contestants that don't declare nothing every round, but miss the max virtually every round. This might encourage weaker players to donate.
I considered that, but I thought it would get confusing if the real people ever signed up.Gavin Chipper wrote:Instead of Apterous Plum/Prune/Cunt or whatever, how about using the names of real past contestants of that general skill level, or would that be too slanderous?
Yes, I have been meaning to implement this since at least July. I will eventually figure out a nice way of doing it.Gavin Chipper wrote:This may have already been suggested (in fact I think I've seen it but couldn't find it in a quick look and it hasn't been implemented) but couldn't you make it so if you're typing in a word when the time runs out you can finish it? You can enter your numbers solution in it's entirety after the time.
If you were playing against a human (unlikely considering you're, well, you, but you never know) sometimes lag comes into play- I've had half the word typed in the box before only to be told the other person buzzed first.Gavin Chipper wrote:I'm also convinced that I pressed the first letter of the conundrum before it told me time was up (it was close though).
Gavin Chipper wrote: Instead of Apterous Plum/Prune/Cunt
