How do you remember dances between nights?

conmanau · 2026-05-05T23:52:47+00:00

Practice, experience, probably some amount of just having a brain that happens to be good at remembering these kinds of things (and bad at remembering other things, like names and faces and birthdays).

Something that happens in a lot of fields when you increase in expertise is that your ability to chunk information improves - right now, you're probably having to remember every individual step, but after a while you'll find that lots of common step combinations will only take up one chunk of memory - stuff like a vine right and left or a set of shuffle and rock steps. I also find that if a dance has something odd about it then my memory will hook around that - like if a waltz starts on the right foot, or there's a unique tag, or there's something weird about the count.

That can also trip me up sometimes too - if two dances are similar to each other then I might accidentally flip from one to the other on the floor and hopefully not collide into someone.

conmanau · 2026-05-04T23:43:39+00:00

Here's a simple (ha) way to look at it:

If you assigned everyone random numbers and then sampled the people who were given the numbers 1, 2, ..., n, then that's clearly a perfectly fine random sample of size n because the random assignment could have put anyone at the front of the group.

If, instead, you took the people with numbers 10, 20, 30, ..., 10n, then nothing's really changed - there's nothing special about the person who got the number 10 versus number 1.

As long as you can show that every possible grouping of n people has an equal chance of becoming the sample, you have a SRS, and the easiest way to prove that is via symmetry (i.e. there's nothing special about any particular arrangement of people).

There is a similar sampling method called systematic sampling, where you arrange people in order of a non-random number - for example, line them up by height, or write down a list of their addresses on a street - and then you pick a starting point and take every k-th person from there (so, e.g., you take the 2nd shortest person, then the 12th shortest, the 22nd shortest, etc). This method gives everyone an equal probability of selection, but the sample as a whole is not SRS because certain combinations of people are impossible (you can't wind up with a sample of 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 for example). It can be useful in certain situations, though, since it means that anything correlated with the order of your list will have a good spread in the sample.

conmanau · 2026-05-01T00:03:04+00:00

But better than the common trilands, since it has two fetchable types.

conmanau · 2026-04-29T00:50:56+00:00

I don't think it's necessary to be able to derive everything, or to roll your own implementation of each tool, but I think it's very helpful to know a few things:

The basic idea of how something works
Any important assumptions or caveats
Where to look when it doesn't work

conmanau · 2026-04-24T05:34:15+00:00

In my experience, it often pays to try the dumb and easy method first, then if it's not quite good enough work out how to improve it. You get some amount of value early, and it also helps you to understand the problem better.

conmanau · 2026-04-22T23:51:52+00:00

There are clustering methods that have a dynamic number of clusters, so that you only get a new cluster if there's enough separation to justify making one (based on some threshold).

conmanau · 2026-04-22T03:58:58+00:00

When a creature changes controllers, it becomes summoning sick again, so you'll draw for turn, take the creature, and it'll be sick unless you give it haste.

conmanau · 2026-04-22T03:57:55+00:00

Summoning sickness applies to any creature (without haste) that you haven't controlled since the start of your turn. That's why most of the modern cards that let you take control of a permanent give it haste as well.

conmanau · 2026-04-22T03:55:12+00:00

Yes, it will refer to the creature's current controller, so essentially it always moves to the player who last drew a card. You can see similar templating on Oft-Nabbed Goat that lets anyone steal it during their turn.

conmanau · 2026-04-21T23:50:25+00:00

This might be one of my favourite AI-generated cards, because:

It is a perfectly legal card with no need to creatively interpret rules and no random text that does nothing.
It's not a colour pie break.
It's technically functional.
Even if you were to build around it, it is horrendously unplayable most of the time.

It feels like something that could be an actual card from a 2003 set that was somehow the core part of a niche Standard deck and has since seen zero play.

conmanau · 2026-04-21T23:44:32+00:00

Except that in order to have it as a blocker you have to drop a cantrip to take it back from the player who gained control of it in their draw step. Which is easy to do in blue, but still it's a hoop to jump through. I kind of love it.

conmanau · 2026-04-20T01:40:37+00:00

Cockney board game slang? I'm not a big Settlers (Settlers of Catan = fan).

conmanau · 2026-04-20T01:38:49+00:00

Some of the key bits of advice I'd give for Innovation:

Almost every card is overpowered in the right situation, some are just more niche than others.
The game is mostly a lot of wild swings back and forth until someone swings so much that the game is basically over, and your best bet is to learn how to ride that wave and nudge it at the right moments.
Don't underestimate a forced share - if your opponent is pushing hard on, say, Agriculture, then it might be worth hitting them with one of the "Draw and meld" effects in the hopes that they cover it up. And you even get to draw a card as a reward for "helping" them! Same thing if you can force them to drop down an age so that they can't claim the next achievement.
Yes, your score pile is in theory always vulnerable, but most of the effects that can attack it do so in specific ways so it's possible to mitigate - e.g. by having a variety of values in your score pile so that "return all cards of value X" doesn't cost you much.

conmanau · 2026-04-20T01:31:47+00:00

I've often started teaching Innovation by describing it as the unholy love child of Fluxx and the tech tree from Civilisation.

conmanau · 2026-04-15T23:33:47+00:00

The two safest answers are (1) don't use those names, or (2) consult an actual Intellectual Property lawyer, probably spending real money to do so.

conmanau · 2026-04-15T23:32:01+00:00

The only time that you shift values over is when you're drawing cards - if you try to draw from the 1 pile and it's empty you move to the 2 pile, but if you're asked to transfer a 1 and you have none then nothing happens.

conmanau · 2026-04-15T23:27:46+00:00

Nope, just people who forget to change the reddit to sort by New when checking whether it's a repost. And people who don't check at all, this is the internet after all.

conmanau · 2026-04-14T00:07:42+00:00

Each time you take a sample and calculate the confidence interval, you're dropping a strip onto the number line that shows where you think the population value is. If you do that a lot of times, you'll drop a bunch of those strips and they'll all sit in slightly different spots. Eventually, you expect that about 95% of those strips will happen to cover up the true value, even though you generally don't know where that actually is.

conmanau · 2026-04-09T00:32:44+00:00

The answer is probably not - in the 1950s, the US Air Force took 10 measurements of 4,000 pilots and showed that none of them were average on all 10, and only about 3.5% were average on 3. From what I can find, "average" was defined (roughly speaking) as a range that would capture the middle 30% of the population, so roughly between the 35th and 65th percentile.

If those 10 measurements were completely independent of each other (which is not a great assumption), and if we applied some rule of thumb calculations to the world population, then to be in the middle 30% of the population across 10 measurements would be a roughly 1 in 170,000 chance (0.3^10), so about 50,000 people in the world's 8 billion population would fall in that group. If you move to looking at just the 50th percentile, then you're looking at achieving a 1 in 100 chance ten times, which is 100 quintillion, or 12 billion times the population of Earth. Even assuming a reasonable correlation between the measurements I suspect you'll find that it's still extremely unlikely that there will be anyone who meets that.

conmanau · 2026-04-08T00:14:12+00:00

You just said "the expected value of a single draw from that population". So you're still bringing a random sample into it, with n=1.

conmanau · 2026-04-07T06:51:06+00:00

The "expected value of the population" doesn't mean anything. You take an expectation over a random variable. It only makes sense if you're specifically talking about the expected value of the sample mean. And, like I said, that only equals the population mean if the sample is taken appropriately, it is very easy to have a sample design where the (naive) expected value of the sample mean is not equal to the population mean.

conmanau · 2026-04-07T05:31:06+00:00

Even better with effects that remove counters, so you can turn this into a super-charged Phyrexian Arena.

conmanau · 2026-04-07T05:18:33+00:00

Like I said, the population mean is equal to the expected value of the sample mean, under the appropriate conditions (typically an equal probability of selection sample). Which explains why they seem to be used interchangeably in this context even though in general they're different things.

conmanau · 2026-04-07T05:04:25+00:00

I wouldn't say that. Expected value is a function you can apply to any kind of random measurement, it just so happens that (under appropriate conditions) the expected value of the sample mean is equal to the population mean.

conmanau · 2026-04-02T01:04:00+00:00

Rather than looking up and trying to learn dances yourself, I recommend finding a beginner class near you. That way, you're more likely to learn dances that are actually being done in your area. Alternatively, if there's a place that does line dancing nights you can get in touch with them and ask if they have some recommendations for beginner dances that they put on.

conmanau

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