Talk:Y (game)

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I would like to take issue with the claim that Y is "superior" to Hex just because Hex is arguably a "subset" of Y on a triangular grid (with no pentads.)

First of all, what really matters is, which game is more interesting? By this I mean, which has more tactical and strategical depth? These are the criteria I regard as important for determining which game is "superior." It is not particularly relevant that a Y game can turn into the equivalent of a blank Hex board, since the only way this can happen is if both players make a series of bad moves. Bad moves are inherently not very interesting, at least not to me.

How interesting a game is, of course, depends on who is judging it. I haven't played any high quality games of Y, so I am not qualified to say how interesting it is. One possible measure of how deep a game is, is how many moves it lasts as a function of the grid size. I make the assumption that on average, a Y game will fill up approximately the same portion of the board regardless of how large the board is. From looking at game records of Y games using a triangular grid, most of the games I saw filled up less than 40% of the board, and often less than 30%. Hex games, by comparison, tend to go over 40% on average, and sometimes over 50%. I will try to find the archive I saw and post its URL here. It might be argued that if a game uses more of the board, it has more depth to it.

(UPDATE: The PBMserv archive is here. They have Hex games, but no Y games because 50 games have not completed yet. So, I cannot yet provide a comparison in the length of games.)

A better measure of how deep Y is would arise, if a lot of people play rated games. The scope of a game might be measured by the "point spread." For example, if player B beats player A 80% of the time, and C beats B 80% of the time, and so on, how many such steps would take you from an average player to the best player? By this measure, Go is undeniably a much deeper game than chess.

Official Y (with pentads, which are interior points with 5 neighbors) does seem to make better use of the whole board than triangular Y, but this in turn may create a problem with the equalization protocol at the start of the game. The standard "pie rule" allows the 2nd player to swap sides after the first player has placed the first stone on the board. In triangular Y, there are initial moves (such as in a corner) which certainly are losing initial moves, and should not be swapped. So, it seems like a natural conclusion that there must be some initial moves which would lead to a reasonably well balanced game. But in Kadon's official Y, I suspect that even an initial move in a corner (which now has three neighbors instead of just two) should be swapped. So, maybe the pie rule does not balance the game as well as it does in triangular Y. A more complicated protocol might do the trick, such as 3-move equalization, but it would be a shame to add such a "kludge" to a pristine ruleset.