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Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 11:47 am
by Daniel Pati
I hope you'll forgive the pretentious post title, but I'm finding following these rules gives greater beauty to the game:
  • • Pick letter selections for the greatest maximum
    • If there is more than one word available, the word which uses the most unusual letters is best
    • If your choices all contain common letters, a word people know is better than one only Apterites know
    • If your choices are between a word and its anagram, the better one is one which cannot have an "s" appended
    • Prime words (that cannot be broken down) are superior to words that end in -ier, -iest etc
    • The pinnacle is a darrenic pencil reached by well chosen letter selection
    • For numbers, the solution using fewest numbers is most elegant
You might not agree with all of these but I would love to hear your amendments and additions.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 11:51 am
by Matt Morrison
Welcome back. (I'll have more to say on the matter later on.)

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 2:37 pm
by Innis Carson
Agree with all of that, although personally I would give going with a more commonly used word even higher priority (although obviously never at the expense of score). It's just nicer I think, makes it feel more like a word game rather than a symbols game, even if this is a delusion.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 5:14 pm
by Mark Deeks
Unless you're pencil fishing, if you have a choice between a word you know the meaning of, and a word you don't, take the former.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 5:31 pm
by Matthew Tassier
My personal rules on the art of apterous:
When picking 1 large a solution which doesn't use the large number is superior.
Dividing is somehow superior to adding, subtracting, multiplying.
Animals are always superior to other words of the same length.
The worst possible word to declare is RATION.

Agree with the original post except for always picking for the greatest maximum. AEIONRST? is never artistic.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 7:34 pm
by Matt Morrison
The best numbers solves are Omelette-compliant and expressed orderly.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 9:27 pm
by Andy Platt
Taking the numbers into the 90-thousands

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2012 10:35 pm
by Dan McColm
Avoid -ING words.
Always declare the most obscure word possible.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2012 11:02 am
by Peter Mabey
Use big factors - eg 899 is 29x31, not 900-1; 7 is the best of the single digit multipliers.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2012 8:03 am
by Matt Morrison
Let's not forget that doing an anagram just because a word was mentioned is not acceptable outside of apterous and you will look like a prick.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2012 9:35 am
by Mark Deeks
Matt Morrison wrote:Let's not forget that doing an anagram just because a word was mentioned is not acceptable outside of apterous and you will look like a prick.

That's just a symptom of the addiction, though. When you sign up to Apterous, you impliedly consent to the fact that this is how the rest of your life is going to be. Poor old Mauro Pratesi, through no fault of his own, can only ever be known as Mauro Pirates for this reason. It's just automatic. And frankly a bit unpleasant.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2012 4:57 pm
by Andy Platt
or Amour Parties, which sounds either reasonably romantic or quite orgy-esque, whichever you prefer, Mark Dekes.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2012 5:33 pm
by Adam Gillard
Someone made the mistake of mentioning 'Galliard' in my presence the other day. I wasn't even involved in the conversation, but felt compelled to interject that it's an anagram of 'A. Gillard'.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 12:58 am
by Adam Dexter
I just realised that I got the pencil for DEXTER. Does this count as artful?

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 10:11 pm
by Liam Tiernan
Adam Dexter wrote:I just realised that I got the pencil for DEXTER. Does this count as artful?
Artful? Not sure. It does display a certain degree of dexterity, though.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2012 7:24 pm
by Steve Balog
Not sure if this counts as art, and it might sound a bit crackpotted, but I actually "see" colors in the small numbers selected in numbers game selections. Like, they don't appear colored on the screen, but my imagination kind of sees them in color in the back of my head.

1: White. Can appear slightly yellow next to 9s or especially 6s.
2: Blueish-green.
3: Red. Similar shade as 9, but more muted.
4: A darker blueish-purple.
5: A light blue of malleable darkness. Defaults to almost a sky blue, but gets darker if surrounded by "dark" numbers.
6: Bright red-orange.
7: A very full shade of purple. Stands out ahead of all the numbers.
8: Black.
9: Red, but a fuller, darker red than 3.
10: Moderately shaded blue.

They sort of appear like this in my mind's eye on their own:

Image

In general, I find rounds where the color pattern looks pretty to be more difficult than those where it looks discordant. Like, if I see a 2L round of X X 1 2 5 10 or X X 3 6 7 9 I kind of prepare for a harder game before the target pops up than if I see something like a X X 2 5 8 9 or X X 2 3 7 10 or something like that.

Also the numbers do sort of blend with those next to them if they can -- so the 5 in a X X 10 8 5 8 round is going to be a lot darker to me than the one in a X X 10 1 5 3 round. This also means that the same exact round can be a lot harder if the numbers are lined up differently. X X 5 10 4 7 is somewhat harder than X X 5 7 10 4. No idea why.

I think the thing that led me to make this long winded post was a recent round of X X 2 2 5 10, where I said aloud "damn, that's a really blue selection" and immediately realised how weird sounding that statement is out of context. I naturally bottled the round :lol:

EDIT: I personally think RETAINS is the ugliest word to declare in a letters round.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2012 8:02 pm
by Matthew Tassier
Steve Balog wrote:Not sure if this counts as art, and it might sound a bit crackpotted, but I actually "see" colors in the small numbers selected in numbers game selections. Like, they don't appear colored on the screen, but my imagination kind of sees them in color in the back of my head.

1: White. Can appear slightly yellow next to 9s or especially 6s.
2: Blueish-green.
3: Red. Similar shade as 9, but more muted.
4: A darker blueish-purple.
5: A light blue of malleable darkness. Defaults to almost a sky blue, but gets darker if surrounded by "dark" numbers.
6: Bright red-orange.
7: A very full shade of purple. Stands out ahead of all the numbers.
8: Black.
9: Red, but a fuller, darker red than 3.
10: Moderately shaded blue.

They sort of appear like this in my mind's eye on their own:

Image

In general, I find rounds where the color pattern looks pretty to be more difficult than those where it looks discordant. Like, if I see a 2L round of X X 1 2 5 10 or X X 3 6 7 9 I kind of prepare for a harder game before the target pops up than if I see something like a X X 2 5 8 9 or X X 2 3 7 10 or something like that.

Also the numbers do sort of blend with those next to them if they can -- so the 5 in a X X 10 8 5 8 round is going to be a lot darker to me than the one in a X X 10 1 5 3 round. This also means that the same exact round can be a lot harder if the numbers are lined up differently. X X 5 10 4 7 is somewhat harder than X X 5 7 10 4. No idea why.

I think the thing that led me to make this long winded post was a recent round of X X 2 2 5 10, where I said aloud "damn, that's a really blue selection" and immediately realised how weird sounding that statement is out of context. I naturally bottled the round :lol:

EDIT: I personally think RETAINS is the ugliest word to declare in a letters round.
Synesthesia. I'm quite jealous, thanks for sharing that. Love the idea that a numbers selection can be "really blue". Do the large numbers have any colour, either their own or a combination of their digits? I presume the numbers had these colours before apterous, or do the same numbers have different colours in different contexts? Do you ever think to yourself "black plus dark blueish purple equals 12" etc?
All my numbers are just black :(

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 1:58 am
by Steve Balog
Numbers have always been red (3, 6, 9), blue (2, 5, 0, and sort of 4), purple (7, this one stands out to the point it gets its own group), and white/black (1 and 8). The larges... 25 is like a slightly lighter version of 2, 50 is a slightly darker blue than 10, and 100 is pretty similar to 10, but 75 is brown for some reason (for hyper, 150 is a lighter than 5 blue, almost white, and 200 is like 2, but slightly more green). They aren't really much different than 25/50/100/150/200 outside of the site. 75 is weird, because outside of Apterous longer numbers just sort of become the sum of their digits with some blending and 75 in a forum post like this is just purple then lightish blue (a darker than usual 5 because 7 is a striking number).

In most parts of life it's only a minor thing, like sometimes I'll look at a string of numbers and it can invoke a scene (example, in a string like 8634798 I see a somewhat nightmarish, almost hell-like landscape form, while 1051205 is wintery). Other times it'll be too chaotic and it'll just be numbers (my zip code disappointingly invokes nothing).

As for whether it can help me do math? ... Sadly, not in the slightest. It's been a weirdly good predictor of what rounds might be trouble but hasn't helped me actually do the math. Mainly because, well, "red + blue" isn't always the same thing -- it can be red (3 + 10), blue (3 + 2), black (3 + 5), or white (6 + 5).

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 9:46 am
by Matt Morrison
First decent post in this thread, the Balog.

Re: Finding art within Apterous

Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 12:25 am
by Steve Balog
And in trying to max more numbers attacks my mild synesthesia is proving a nuisance more than a help in Lockdown.

In the selection, the mandatory number had a red background, the others get blue ones. The red background is very, very similar to the "3" color. I'm finding it much harder to concentrate on a selection when the mandatory number is a blue number because it mentally clashes with the background it's on. It's worse when the number right next to it, on the blue background, is one of the red numbers :lol:

I'm getting a much lower solve rate on Lockdown numbers despite having yet to encounter a round where I've had a correct solution that didn't use the required number but none that does, that is, a round I'd get in Normal but not in Lockdown. This is actually slowing my thought processes down somewhat. It's almost like that test you might have seen where you are given the names of colors that are in a different color text than the word and have to name the color of the text, not what the word says.

And I don't get a bonus for a mandatory red number and blue numbers in the other spots, it's just a penalty when they don't match.