Talk:Morpion solitaire

The wikipedia page doesn't exist - where else can the exact rules be seen? The task says "A move is made by adding one point to the end of a line of 4 and drawing a straight line through the 5 points." But the in the given example RosinA the move number 2 is the middle point of a diagonal line (not the end). So obviously diagonal lines are allowed, but what means then "drawing a straight line through the 5 points"? Also, the description says that "lines cannot overlap existing lines" which contradicts this --Abu 13:48, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

The WP page does exist, the link was just spelled wrong. The rules are pretty clear there. Looks like it takes practice to get it. --Mwn3d 13:52, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Ah. Yeah, it's fine to add a point anywhere that creates a line of 5. When it says lines cannot overlap, I think a better way of putting it might be that lines can't share more than one point. (They can cross at one point, but can't overlap pieces of the line itself.) MagiMaster 21:15, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Presumably that means that we cannot have a line of more than five. Markhobley 21:05, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Can we drop "and drawing a line through them" from the task description (or is that some sort of crossing out or deletion?). In other words do we keep the line of 5 Xs? or do we delete them (by changing them to dots), or do we need change them to Os (representing a crossing out) to prevent them from being reused? Markhobley 21:05, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Are these legal or not legal?:

X   X      X   X     XXXXX       X
X   X      XXXXX      XXXXX      XX
XXXXX      X   X                XXXXX
X   X      XXXXX                 XX
X   X      X   X                 XX
                                  X

(Presumably they are impossible to form and none are legal. Is that right?)

Markhobley 07:44, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

"Drawing a straight line" simply marks the line just completed so it's easier to see what happened. Each node is allowed to be shared by multiple lines, if the lines are all oriented at different directions. If two lines are aligned, apparently there are two different rules: the "T" (touching) rule says two colinear lines are allowed to share one end point only; the "D" (disjoint) rule says colinear lines can't share nodes at all. The following:

AAAACBBBB

is allowed by the T rule, where AAAAC and CBBBB are two legal lines; by D rule, only one of them is legal (whichever came first). On the other hand,

XXXXXOOOOO

are considered two legal lines by both rules. I'm unsure what happens if you put a piece at the blank in

XXX_XXX

--whether the whole thing is considered as one oversized line, or only 5 or them would be considered used... Then again, the whole thing is pretty bogus in that it's NP-hard so no "proper" solution exists, it's not much fun to play, and it's not much fun to watch, so there. --Ledrug 08:40, 19 July 2011 (UTC)