(Untitled)

[abdiel]

Petals Around the Rose is a game that I found a year or two ago, and for some reason my thoughts drifted back to it tonight. The game is simple: the person who knows the rules rolls five dice, and he tells the other people playing what the score is, based on what numbers the dice land on. The object of the game is to figure out the method of

Comments

[inhumandecency]

I spent half an hour on it and then cheated. Do you mean your method was less difficult than Gates's? The author didn't even try to obfuscate the code.

I'm a little ashamed that I cheated, although now that I know the answer I doubt I'd have figured it out in any reasonable amount of time.

Perhaps an appropriate brainteaser for me would be to figure out how the rule relates to the name of the game.

[inhumandecency]

Yes, I misspoke. Like you, I went through the javascript to get the answer, which took me about five minutes. The simplicity of the answer made me feel a little stupid, but on the other hand I'm sure that it would have taken me a very long time to get the solution, and so cheating was the appropriate thing to do. As for the game's name. . .

Major spoiler warning - the game’s solution and the meaning of the game’s name are below. . .The rose is the dot on the center of a die, and its petals are the dots around it. The solution is found by counting the dots around the center dot on each die (if the die lands on a one or has no center dot, then its score is zero, of course). Some people claim to have figured out the solution in only two or three rolls, and the only way I can conceive of them doing this is if they took the name of the game to heart. Personally, I never would have figured it out that way. Probably, I would have just noticed that some dice count for no points, and some count for some points, and then I would have figured

[abdiel]

Fuck, did you read the spoiler? I never should have posted that spoiler.

[abdiel]

Yes, they say that the smarter you are, the longer it will take for you to figure out, simply because you have more knowledge and experience to draw from and try to apply to the puzzle. I don't know if I believe this, and as I said, I certainly felt foolish afterwards.