Boredom Chasers?

yuggler asks: "Ever found yourself in a boring meeting, class or lecture? Sure! Does anyone know of something to do to make time fly? I feel that somekind of simple game, at the most requiring paper and pen would be the ultimate soultion. So, my question to you is: Does anoyone know of a game with childishly easy rules, yet with a depth that can keep the player(s) spellbound for a small eternity? An excellent example of what I'm trying to describe is the game Sprouts which only takes 30 seconds to learn, but will take a good portion of your meetings to fully understand. I am currently being tormented in a Swedish highschool, and feel in desperate need of something to get me through classes like Swedish, and Chemistry, while waiting for the programming and technology-classes."

Comments

Why not pay attention in class?

[pxld]

I can usually fight off boredom by thinking critically about the topics being covered. Then when I feel myself getting bored, I start to think of good points to raise or questions to ask. If those tactics don't work out, I recommend reading Flow : The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Amazon)

When I was a boy...

[itwerx]

...all I had was a piece of string and a stick!

A solution and rebuttal

[Snafoo]

First of all:

* Paying attention in class is not necessarily necessary, especially if you already know the subject, /point finale/. Lectures in general, IMO, are rather pointless exercises in pseudo-education. For me at least, with a topic of anything more than nominal complexity, a textbook is invaluable while lectures, put simply, are a waste of time. I'm surprised that slashdot has turned up so many droids-in-training! Seriously, though. My suspicion is that people like the psychological kick in the ass associated with waking up early,going to class, etc.; it makes them feel as though they're sacrificing something to 'learn', and therefore that they have more to lose by slacking, and therefore they'll study harder on their homework, and therefore do better, and therfore attribute this to going to class, therefore, they go to more class, and the current educational model perpetuates itself. ( The model, I believe, is analogous to that used by many major religions to maintain piousness: Show up at place X at time Y every N days and you're saved! ) So long as you're disciplined enough to focus on the time on the homework w/o the psychological guilt-crutch, then you can skip almost unlimited amounts of time.

But whatever works for you...

* And as for your actual problem: Learn Go. (aka 'Wei Chi', which certainly yields more relevant hits in Google ;) You can write the rules to the game in about four instructions, and it can be played on any size of board or grid. Better still, each individual piece is never moved after being placed on the board (until removed -- which doesn't happen frequently enough to be annoying (unless the pieces are your own ;) ) ), which means that 'Go: Napkin Edition' can be played whenever you have a pencil handy.

Oh, did I mention that the gameplay requires more thought than Chess? And that GNU-based Go servers and clients are available at all over the known Internet, as well as (passable) AI oppoents?

Okay, so it's two players... but once you get good, you'll want to practice constantly, and it's the sort of game conducive to experimentation and situation-analysis. In particular, books of Go problems are quite fun... take a look at one of the problems, and go to your lecture. By the time lecture is over, you just might have solved it.

Sprouts info

[martyb]

The link to sprouts mentioned in the original query seems to have an error in attribution.

"Sprouts is an interesting paper and pencil game for two players. It was invented in Cambridge in the 1970's."

Take a look at: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc97/4_5_97/mathlan d.htm where it states "Sprouts was invented in 1967 by Princeton mathematician John H. Conway and by Michael S. Paterson, when both were at the University of Cambridge in England."

There's a bunch more info on game play, theory, and mathematical background on the game at that link, as well as this link: http://www.forum.swarthmore.edu/news.archives/geom etry.research/article399.html to a strategy by John Conway on a strategy for game play.

As an aside, I knew a guy at RPI who in 1981 or so wrote a program to play the game and graphically display the results... if you wanted it to, it would show all the possibilities as it tried different moves, too! Pretty amazing feat considering the capabilities of the computers we had available at the time.

Re:hp calculator?

[terpia]

Also, only the the biggest prick of a prof would pick on you if he saw you weren't paying attention, especially if he knew you knew your stuff.

Wow. If that's true, I guess most of the teachers I had in High School qualify as BIG PRICKS. I always had a sneaking suspicion about this, but I wasn't sure until now.

Want to know what to do in class? Hack. Classrooms are fun to hack. Back in school, I purchased the smallest universal remote I could find, and used it to mess with the TV/Projection Panels and VCRs in the classes I had. Now you could use something like these happy little devices http://www.quemex.co.uk/, http://www.surprise.com/likes_dislikes/gadgeteer/r emote_control_watch.cfm. You can also use social engineering to cause all sorts of trouble. Or you could always resort to forging a doctor's note stating you have narcolepsy and get one of these free voicemail boxes so they can call in and hear the "doctor's" anwering service, then return the call at your leisure. The whole bottom line I think, is that if you think you're so smart that you don't need to pay attention in class, then you should at least be smart enough to amuse/entertain yourself. Did you really need an Ask Slashdot for this?

Tree-fluid

[Bazman]

Another simple game. Can be played verbally or written on paper if silence is needed, or email if distance is a problem.

First person {says|writes|emails} "Tree". Second person does "Fluid". First person does "Tree". Second person goes "Fluid". And so on.

Until someone says "Sap!" at which point they are declared the winner.

Of course you could win every round by just saying "Sap!" first time, but that would be boring. The skill is saying "Sap!" on the go before your opponent wants to say it, thus causing the maximum amount of annoyance to them! It is very rewarding to get through about ten echoes of 'Tree - Fluid' and then hit 'Sap!' and have the other person go "I WAS JUST GONNA SAY IT!!!". Ahh, satisfaction. Similarly there is great pain in being 'Sapped' just as you are about to say it.

When played face-to-face there can be a lot of psychology and body-language involved. Look for any sign of hesitation in your opponent, that's normally a sign of an impending 'Sap'. Have no mercy, hit back straightaway.

Strangely I cant find any web sites devoted to Tree-Fluid...

Baz

hmmm

[nomadic]

If you're in Sweden, isn't there some hot Swedish girl nearby you can stare at during the class?

solve the degree-diameter problem for small graphs

[msouth]

there are (or at least there were, last time I checked) some unsolved problems in graph theory that can be attacked with pencil and paper.

Make a planar (in 2-d and no edges cross each other) graph where each node has no more than three connections. Each node also has to be no more than three hops from any other node. Can you get more than twelve nodes? Can you prove that nobody else can, either?

I have scribbled away many an intriguing hour playing with this.