{"id":3583,"date":"2016-03-17T13:28:49","date_gmt":"2016-03-17T21:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=3583"},"modified":"2016-03-18T11:18:15","modified_gmt":"2016-03-18T19:18:15","slug":"steam-and-circuitry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=3583","title":{"rendered":"steam and circuitry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite games is <i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.daysofwonder.com\/tickettoride\/\">Ticket to Ride<\/a><\/i> (despite its silly name), in which a strategic element is choosing tickets: pairs of cities to be joined.  The value of a ticket is the length of the shortest path that could fulfill it.<\/p>\n<p>It occurs to me that, if each segment of track is considered as a resistor, the resistance between two cities may be considered a measure of the difficulty of the ticket: you&#8217;re less likely to be blocked if redundant paths exist.  One could then make a list of tickets ranked by payoff divided by resistance.  But each move changes this: after a route is claimed, it has zero resistance for its owner and infinite resistance for others.<\/p>\n<p>Your first act in the game is to choose two or more tickets from a draw of three or four or five; it&#8217;s not obvious how to apply this idea to find the most compatible set.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite games is Ticket to Ride (despite its silly name), in which a strategic element is choosing tickets: pairs of cities to be joined. The value of a ticket is the length of the shortest path that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=3583\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3583"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3587,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3583\/revisions\/3587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}