So-Soo-Yoo

素数遊 The Japanese characters mean "Prime Number Play" 

Buy So-Soo-Yoo on my Etsy page - Check out the Rule Book 📖 

fig. 1. So-Soo-Yoo board, pieces, dice, rulebook

Background

I first started thinking about the design for the game about twenty years ago when I was playing Chute and Ladders with my son when he was small. 

fig. 2. Chutes & Ladders Game

The game is simple, easy to learn and to play, but it occurred to me that if one were to learn, to memorize, all of the connections between the one hundred spaces on the board, one would not be learning anything valuable about mathematics. I began to ask myself if it would be possible to make a game with a similar form and style of play to Chutes & Ladders which did teach valuable information that would be reënforce these skills the more one played.

I also was eager to spare my son having to memorize the multiplication tables (or "ku-ku" 九九 as they call them in Japan--"nine by nine"). It occurred to me that the multiplication tables would be a useful thing on which to base the game. It then hit me that prime factors as a basis for being able to jump around the board, in other words, primes and combinations of primes as the "chutes" and "ladders" of the game I was hoping to design.

Development of the Game

Dr. David Chappell's excellent "scaffolding" diagram elegantly illustrates what I was wrestling with in trying to design the board and envisage the mode of play. The idea was that every legal move would be a jump between some two multiplication tables. Two spots that have one or more prime factors in common are connected, that is, they have a "chute" or a "ladder" between them.

fig. 3. Jumping between multiplication tables by common factors

Obviously the number connections, the degree of interconnectedness, between the spaces on the board was high, much higher than with Chutes & Ladders. I had to figure out how to represent this on a board such that it would not be too complex and would actually be playable as a game. It would also have to be easy to learn, including by small children.

My first idea was a "map" of "countries" possibly with "rivers," each with a number, but this of course broke down quickly. Thirty is the first number with more than two prime factors, 2 x 3 x 5, so "two land" and "the three forest" and "five land" would all have to meet at something like "Thirty City" and so on.

I initially imagined "freeways" numbered for each prime number, e.g., the "Number Two Freeway" or the "Number 13 Freeway," going round and round from a center at the number one, each new freeway starting when it's number came up, with "exit ramps" for each number that shared the same prime factors. In David Chappell's figure 3 the vertical rainbow colored lines are the same sort of thing I was considering with my "freeway" idea. The number of freeways would be high, so using colors to distinguish them was a problem.

My original designs started to look like a Mayan calendar, and the size and complexity started to look unmanageable, and how the game might be played was still unclear.

fig. 4. Mayan Calendar

I then hit upon the idea of simply removing the "freeways" and making the connections between the spaces on the boards based on factors only, with no explicit "pathway" drawn between the board spaces. This gave me the board design as it stands now.

fig. 5. So-Soo-Yoo board

Here, rather than being represented as a "freeway" giving access to other spaces, the prime numbers are simply the spaces with "only one prime factor." The spaces for non-prime numbers have collections of miniature versions of the prime spaces in the form of "bubbles" that show all of their prime factors. I wanted to use colors on the board, but the number of prime factors was too high for a six-color system. I hit on the idea of having a system of patterns that would change every six prime numbers, starting with solid color, then a ring boundary, then a single stripe, then a cross, and finally a central dot (on space number 97). Since 97 is the last prime number that appears as a prime factor on the 200-space board, all prime numbers after that are just plain white.

Now I had the board designed, and I had to work out how the game was actually going to be played.

Mode of Play: Dice

I arbitrarily picked a six-sided die to determine how many moves could be made per turn. A six-sided (Las Vegas) die is familiar to everyone. I had to think about the other dice, however.

It was a problem to determine how to place the tokens and the player pieces such that players would be forced to move around the board, preferably with randomly-determined goals. The goal was of course to force players to prowl around this "map" and thereby learn all of the lessons to be learned over time. These lessons included the multiplication tables, factors, powers and so on.

That's why the board goes up to 199, by the way. I had initially made it to go up to 149, based on the American school practice of studying up to the twelve multiplication tables. This required modifying a twenty-sided die (d20), and I later decided it wasn't worth it.

The board was kind of big, but in fairness only twice the size of Chutes & Ladders, which is played by nursery school children. I wanted to come up with a system for placing pieces randomly on the board. I thought about things like cards, dreidels, a double- or triple- layered spinners. I finally came up with a d20 and a d10, read in order, to give a value between one and two hundred, with two hundred (or zero) being a penalty roll, causing loss of a piece. If the d20 has a twenty and no zero (which they all seem to these days) then a twenty is treated like a zero.

In other words, the die are read from the d20 to the d10, not added, so it's easy for small children. Further, this is easy since reading "17 and 3" obviously matches the 173 space, and small children simply have to compare the symbols to find the space from the dice, without having to do any computations, or even understand how big the numbers are (although this will be learned over time).

So there it is. That's how the dice work.

Mode of Play: Player Pieces

The initial idea was just that there would be tokens, like coins, and player pieces would just be miscellaneous trinkets, like in classic Monopoly.

Initially there was no fixed requirement as to how many player pieces were needed, though in keeping with the whole six-color scheme, I finally went with six player pieces, one of each color with matching tokens.

Another arbitrary choice was that to win you need to collect six tokens (or "rings" in the current implementation). Since there were six colors in play, I decided six tokens were needed to win, and again arbitrarily, that one token of each color or six of one color were needed.

Those are the design decisions that led to the shape of the game as it now stands. At this point, it's good to look at the rule book to see how the game is played.

Explanation of Moves

How Well Does it Work?

The answer would be "very well." Small children, and even adults, can learn to play skillfully very quickly. I've tested it on children as young as nursery school, and I have played it with children in French, English, and Japanese. All are able to learn and begin to play quickly.

It's an "abstract game" which means that it does not require outside knowledge of things like accounting, math, geography, etc., in order to play, or such knowledge would give an advantage to a player possessing such skills.  As such, a nursery schooler may play on even footing with an engineer or retired math professor, and this fact has already been demonstrated. Indeed, since small children tend to just play the rules, as opposed to trying to "figure it out," they tend to make moves more quickly, and even make better moves, than many engineers would. In other words, the game is not "difficult" either to learn or to play, but there is a lot of latitude to "overthink things."

Do Kids Actually Learn Math?

I have done a lot of testing, but this is still something of a question mark. As I've stated, a child does not need math skills to play the game, and indeed that having math skills (or a PhD in mathematics) does not seem to make people "better" at playing the game.

One is passively and repeatedly exposed to the multiplication tables by playing. Ask a child who has played a lot of So-Soo-Yoo if 42 or 49 are factors of seven, or to recite the six multiplication tables, while these would be things that the child has been exposed to by the game, but would the child have learned this? We don't have a lot of data on this yet.

Would they know the difference between 54 and 56? Children the world over have trouble keeping 9 x 6 = 54 and 7 x 8 = 56 straight, since they're just memorizing. In So-Soo-Yoo these two spaces are next to one another, just like half the spaces on the board, but strategically they are totally different. In principle a child who learned the multiplication tables from So-Soo-Yoo would not confuse 54 and 56.

That's the idea--that kids play the game over and over with each other, pushing each other to get better, checking each other's adherence to legal moves, and chasing each over all over the "map" of the natural numbers, hopefully learning all their details and secrets. Any math fact they learn would be some correct move they made, perhaps helping them to win or "bump" an opponent, which might make it memorable. There are "highways" and "hotspots" in the board, or on the number line, which have more factors, or "deserts" which have few and are hard to reach, and experiencing these in the game may drive them home.

Oh, yes, and obviously this game may be played by parents, children, and siblings, and it's just as challenging for all ages. This can offer an opportunity for parents or older siblings to illuminate math facts and principles during play, as they happen.

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Czech page 

Game Geek Page 

模倣子 backronisms

 A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The word is a blend of back and acronym.

An acronym is a word derived from the initial letters of the words of a phrase, such as the word radar, constructed from "radio detection and ranging". ^{By contrast, a backronym is "an acronym deliberately formed from a phrase whose initial letters spell out a particular word or words, either to create a memorable name or as a fanciful explanation of a word's origin."}

For example, the United States Department of Justice's Amber Alert program was named after Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old abducted and murdered in 1996; ^{but officials later publicized the backronym "America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response"}

Actually, i think I’ve heard of this, but thanks for putting it back on the playlist. 

I feel like I should be able to rattle off a few good examples of my own, but nothing leaps to mind. 

I guess words like SCUBA 🤿 (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Aparatus) are just cases like RADAR where somebody wanted something pronounceable and memorable, but wasn’t shoehorning a meaning into an existing word/acronym. 

Is there a name for that? Coming up with a pronounceable acronym? Like SUSPECNA?

And from the Wikipedia article I ran into Backronym

The term quango or QUANGO (less often QuANGOor QANGO) is a description of an organisation to which a government has devolved power, but which is still partly controlled and/or financed by government bodies. The term was originally a shortening of "Quasi-NGO", where NGO is the acronym for a non-government organization.

In its pejorative use, it has been widely applied to public bodies of various kinds, and a variety of backronymshave been used to make the term consistent with this expanded use. The most popular have been "Quasi-autonomous national government organization" and "Quasi-autonomous non-government organization", often with the acronym modified to "qango" or "QANGO".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quango?wprov=sfti1

That’s really interesting. 

I can almost think of one or two more. It’s like a meta-acronym, where one bit is an acronym, which makes up often one letter of a new acronym, but that’s almost something else again. 

I’ll try to recall some good examples. Does the fact that I can’t mean my brain 🧠 is going soft? I think I could’ve rattled things off once upon a time. 

I think the computer industry has a few. 

Not a particularly good example, but a guy name Bourne wrote the first shell 🐚 (I won’t attempt to explain what that is except to say the it’s a generic scripting and user interface which you have to run in order to log in or do anything), and it was called “sh” or “/bin/sh”. There was another shell written called “C shell” (“C” being a language) and it was named “csh”. The point being that if it had been a Pascal language interface, it would’ve been named “pascalsh” or “passh”. 

Anyway, the punchline. An enhancement (now used everywhere) was made to Bourne shell, which was named “bash” or “Bourne-again shell.”

GNU is a Unix open source movement. It stands for “Gnu’s Not Unix”, an infinitely recursive acronym rather like “GoD” Is “God of Djinn 🧞‍♂️ “.

Anyway, one common utility, replacing the old C compiler is the GNU version, the GNU C compiler, or “gcc”. 

“troff” is an early typesetting utility whosename came from the expression "to run off a copy". No attendant 🐖 pig-related utilities that I know off. 

The big typesetting utility TeX, was apparently taken from the Greek 🇬🇷 “TeX” or “tech” and one enhancement by Lamport was called “LaTeX” (though apparently Lamport won’t admit to the etymology) and there’s also a version called “ConTeXt” but I don’t know what that one’s for. 

Oh, this one is fun. The lexical analyzer utility is “lex” and the compiler building tool is “yacc” or “Yet Another Compiler Compiler” so of course the GNU version of “yacc” is named “bison”. 

I think one can imagine that the internal library calls are rife with this sort of thing, but I did my system-level programming during the System V / Berkeley era, which, while not a pun desert 🌵 doubtless nothing compared to the present. 

I did write a security system (the “priest” program) into which I crammed as many catholic jokes and references as I could find, but nothing that FDR would consign to backronymy, before Congress or elsewhere. 

And of course we have “gmail” for “Google e-mail”

I know there are some much better ones (to do with government or well-known inventions), so I shall slog on a-pondering!

Thanks!

Will Smith Slap reveals female privilege

Facebook Link 

t.co/NcRfdjWxqe from David Mack’s Tweet 

Rock made a joke about Jada Smith’s bald head. There’s footage of the joke if you look it up. Jada has an autoimmune illness that caused her hair loss. So the joke about Jada going for GI Jane part 2 was in bad taste. Not enough people get smacked if you ask me.

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I saw it. Interesting even on many levels. 

Yes, the whole joke revolved around somebody being bald from an illness, which would definitely not land with cancer, so you can see it landing for anything else. 

I agree that more people should be smacked, even though it’s assault and battery. Laying a beating on somebody in front of hundreds of witnesses is not a good risk. I guess if it’s in the chivalrous Defence of a woman’s honor (particularly one’s wife) then I guess you can just walk. 

You see, chivalry isn’t dead ☠️ The truth of this is evidenced by what Will Smith got away with doing and the ostensible reason for why he did it and how that was acceptable to “the public” and how he laughed about it himself a little bit before Jada gave him the stink-eye. 

Long story short the enabling factor was “defending a woman” and that was absolutely airtight. 

Interesting stuff. 

So it could be said that Will Smith’s action, violently and publicly assaulting another man, committing aggravated assault and battery, in front of hundreds of witnesses, and it being perfectly exonerated, even to the point of police not even looking into it, purely on behalf of a woman, is a ringing example of female privilege.  

If Will Smith had done what he did for almost any other justification, he might have gotten arrested. Certainly Chris Rock could’ve pressed charges, which he could in this case as well, but didn’t, again because of female privilege. 

Furthermore, this is an example of the much ballyhooed but widely misunderstood patriarchy. Chris Rock knew that Will Smith was coming to do something to him when he saw him coming up on stage. Imagine if the roles were reversed. If Will Smith were MCing s ceremony and insulted Chris Rock’s wife. Would Chris Rock be able to jump up and lay a beating on Will Smith? I doubt it. 

Will Smith is arguably a higher status male than Chris Rock, and I would argue that this carries with it certain privileges. Among these is that in conflicts like this one, the “public” (certainly other men) side with the higher-status man. By this token, if in some alternate reality where Chris Rick were the one trying to trot up on stage to repay affrontery with slappery, the public of other men would not take his side, he could not get away with it. 

An anecdote leaps to mind from a Hillary Clinton bio I saw recently. Hillary and a friend were lined up to apply for law school and some of the boys were calling to them not to apply saying things like “if you get in you take one of our places and we have to go die in Vietnam 🇻🇳 ”

Clinton put this down to her being victimized by the patriarchy. Yes and no. Clinton was more talented and smart, and she got in, and no doubt some unlucky second lieutenants didn’t get to be lawyers, and also went to Vietnam to be killed with a terror and cruelty which we normally spare even insects 🐜 

Clinton had a choice. The boys didn’t. It was a zero sum game. Even if we leave out that many of these boys had to succeed to satisfy their demanding parents (fathers, again, the patriarchy), if they didn’t make it into a college, they would face a terrifying experience experience and probably be killed. Clinton faced none of these perils. 

This sort of uneven exchange is typical of the patriarchy. Women would do well to understand this. It can make the difference between an easy insertion into a work, academic, social, or other environment, or a painful and difficult one. At least, that is my theory. 

Another example is the early days of computerization, just after the advent of big IBM computers and the invention of high level languages such as ForTran and COBOL. By the way, COBOL was invented by a woman, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. A number of important things in the computer field are due to women, and it shouldn’t surprise anybody. 

Anyway, there was a rampant need for programmers, people to write what would become the millions upon millions of lines of computer programs to run America’s 🇺🇸 businesses, banks, insurance companies, airline booking systems, governments, and so on. 

One humorous quote I’ve heard is “We’d take anybody, college dropouts, minorities, even women,” and another, “The way we chose people was you look in one of their ears, and if you couldn’t see daylight on the other side, they were hired.”

Obviously not a zero sum game. Still issues dealing with the patriarchy, but not in terms of getting in the door. Plus a woman is just as valuable as a man, so one more person means more work done. Women are just as capable repositories of organizational knowledge, so they can help bring in new people, etc. 

This is what people don’t get. The patriarchy is a hierarchy in which men bully other men, just like a pecking order with chickens 🐓 It’s life and death ☠️ in its seriousness. A man may be assaulted violently, and depending upon his status, other men may or may not stand up for him. Women may not perceive how pervasive this is. Women have intrinsic value, men do not. This hierarchy can serve women, as it did Jada Pinket-Smith in this case, since she’s attached to a high-status male who can force other males to do her bidding or pay for her displeasure. Other women are not as lucky 🍀 most aren’t, since there are many more low-status males than high-status ones, Obviously. 

Where women see the patriarchy harming them, or getting in their way, is when they have trouble inserting themselves into environments and roles that involve working with men, especially those that have long traditions of having only men. The problem involves questions of whether the entrant women are trying to insert themselves into this male hierarchy, or just attaching themselves to one of the males of some given status in the hierarchy, are they competing with men for a position in the hierarchy, and are they able to display the kind of commitment to maintaining a position, and so on. This can be tricky, since women can attach themselves to high status males in the pyramid, often assuming the same status as said males, and low-status males fear and resent this. They also fear and resent that women can come and go as they please, while a man stuck is some kind of position has to maintain relationships and try to advance bit by bit as best he can. If he screws up here, he may have few other options. He also has no sexual charms to use on his fellow men. Indeed, men like having women around as a general rule, but if these women are attached to higher status men (wives, girlfriends, office assistants) it’s a very direct reminder of one’s lower male status. That’s another thing for women to be aware of when attempting to insert themselves into mostly male environments. 

It’s worth mentioning that I’ve worked many years in the computer sector, in the USA 🇺🇸 and abroad. I’ve worked for women and men. I’ve never heard any men say this, and I’m sure there are exceptions, but there may be a few patriarchy-related things that make working for a woman 👩 easier than working for a man. I may be going out on a limb here, but a woman exercises her supervisory powers based on her office, while a man also has social hierarchy clout  which he may bring to bear, which is by its nature humiliating to underlings. A male boss may be “chummy” with male underlings to mitigate this inherent condescension. 

Against better judgement, I might speculate on how male bosses behave toward women underlings and how female bosses deal with their underlings. If a male worker has some kind of problem working for a woman, maybe best to shunt him off to another supervisor. I’ve had to straighten out some troublesome employees, and it’s seldom fun, but you shouldn’t have to deal with sexism or racism (and my view is that a lot of what we call “sexism” is really more like racism). 

My off the cuff take is that female bosses are free to deal with all their underlings on a similar basis and I’ll tell you why. A male boss has to deal with the patriarchal relationship he has with male underlings, and also with female underlings who are not part of the patriarchy. This means that he does not have social hierarchy control. A male or a female worker may be equally skilled and dedicated, but the male boss knows how much pressure he can put on the male underling—men are trained from a young age things like loyalty to other men, higher-status men, the penalties for disloyalty or not pulling for the team, etc—but the female may not be so easily read. Secondly, as I said earlier, “access” to women increases male status (even if there is nothing going on).  So a male boss might be “frosty” toward female underlings since the fact that they work for him grants him an elevated patriarchal status vis-à-vis other men and he may not want to be seen as aware of this and cultivating it. There’s also the desire to steer clear of any inappropriate sexual liaison, of course. If a male boss is comparably “chummy” with female underlings, he risks being seen as pumping up his status on the patriarchy through female connections he enjoys thanks to his position in the organization, even his intent is just to be fair. Men get a bump even from brief interactions with women. A boss spending a lot of time with female underlings may cause jealousy among male underlings. There is also the fear that the perception that female coworkers are using their sexual power to garner favors can cause resentment among male coworkers. The male boss has to contend with balancing this effect as well. 

In short, men are trapped in a matrix which is very real and often very cruel. Women should probably think about which of these they even want to consider entering, go in with open eyes, as it were. Women are no less capable than men, and some rules and constraints may be relaxed and adjusted (day care, pregnancy leave, menstruation 🩸 days off, etc.) to make it easier to function inside the patriarchy.  

The patriarchy does not exist to oppress women as such (there are plenty of other things set up to do that!), but to oppress men. Men are trapped in this matrix in order to get along with other men, usually in an unpleasant and onerous way. Women sometimes find this system harsh and oppressive (unlike Jada Smith this night!), but men do much more so and cannot escape it. Anything that women can do to ease things would be most welcome.  

Fragile Mediocre White Male Faux-Feminists

 Original Article about Mediocre White Men

(By Wil “Wesley Crusher” Wheaton)

My response…

Good piece! You “crushed” it. An important category of this mediocre male fragility seems to be the slightest whiff of questioning of faux-feminist dogma. It’s as if they believe simping, cucking, bombastic-yet-treakly ranting directed at other men will somehow get them laid.

(This was apparently “unclear”)

Wheaton makes the point that fragile white males are obsessed with man/explaining in minute detail what others should do vis-à-vis some standard of political correctness. I was trying to point out that there is a subcategory of fragile white males who do this around pseudo-feminist dogma. The slightest hint of interrogation of women’s issues sends some FWMs into a blind rage, typically without even reading what one is saying. I further wondered if this behavior were some kind of attempt to curry the (sexual) favor of womanhood generally. In other words, is it some kind of pathetic, simpering, contemporary form of chivalry, and if so, just like conventional chivalry, mightn’t it serve to keep women as a group firmly stuck in their current socio-political place?

漫画 How to Program II BW Cover

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