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Welcome to MindSports
Acknowledgement
  • We humbly acknowledge that old games are always better because inventing games is one of two human activities excluded from progress. The other one is the brain activity of people who subscribe to that point of view.
  • You can play here for free. The Arena is dedicated to high strategy only, and features a rating system.
    A further selection of interesting games can be played in The Pit.
  • We're more committed to strategy games than to tactical ones. Here's the difference:
    Strategy games have strategies varied enough to allow different styles of play, tactics varied enough to induce their own terminology, and a structure that allows advantageous sub-goals to be achieved as calculable signposts along the way.
    Tactical games have strategies that are either fairly obvious (however deep), like Pente, or fairly obscure, like Othello.
 
Spirit
  • Games have a spirit - the ones of Chess and Draughts have been implemented in one form or another by almost every culture in the world.
  • We're not entirely serious all the time, yet we may bring up that:

    • Having thoughts is not the same as thinking.
    • Opinions are difficult because they're too damn easy.
    • José Raúl Capablanca and Bobby Fischer were great players, not great inventors.
    • Draughts players are hooked on opposition - they'll oppose anything.
    • To make a small fortune with abstract games, start with a big one.
    • Life is fundamentally futile and great games are a tribute to precisely that.

  • Defining the Abstract - a leading article by J. Mark Thompson.
 
On programmability
  • Programming Symple
    Symple has been selected as the featured game for the 2013 CodeCup Challenge. The competitions have been completed. The best programs do not quite measure up to the best humans yet, but they're close.
 
Apps
 
Upcoming / running events
 
Puzzles
  • In this section you will find a number of unique combinatorial puzzles in two classes, tilings and 3D.
    All puzzles © This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
 
Side dishes
  • Math: We've discovered the structure of the series of successively better approximations of the roots of natural numbers, and the inherent division of non-squares in two distinct classes: carréphylic and carréphobic numbers.
 
I Ching Connexion
  • The I Ching Connexion, a divination program based on the one-to-one correlation between the 64 hexagons of the China Labyrinth and the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, is now available online.
 
Finally
  • We're not democratic, but we welcome suggestions and we do actually answer questions (sometimes).
  • A note on gender: we use pronouns like 'he' or 'him' to exclude awkward constructions rather than women.
 
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