[Icehouse] tough Zendo rules

[Timothy Hunt]

On 12/30/06, Dan Isaac 2 <disaac2 at carolina.rr.com> wrote:
> Well, the trouble with the Null koan, and why it has been ruled illegal in
> the base rules of Zendo, is that people can interpret it differently.
>

I've looked through all of Kory's Zendo pages, and I find no such prohibition...

> So in your example:
> > 1a) AKHTBNIAOI it has no red pieces (Null has BN)
> > 1b) AKHTBNIAOI if only consists of blue or green or yellow pieces or
> > any combination of those three (Null, as it does not contain at least
> > one blue or green or yellow, does not have BN)
>
> I could say that in 1b) the null koan DOES have the BN since it has no
> pieces that contradict your rule. It has no pieces that are NOT Yellow,
> Green, nor Blue.

Hmm... interesting interpretation, and I see your point.


> P.S.> By the way, you could make most rules into your two-part style by
> stating it one way as "must have at least one piece" (== "the null koan does
> NOT have the BN") and the other way without that condition. (Or force the
> second version with the condition that "the null koan has BN".)
>

Yes, but that performs my wish trivially so.

Thinking further, I guess what I'm actually interested in exploring
are those rule-pairs where there is a single koan to distinguish them,
without having a trivial exception.  Adding "must have at least one
piece" makes that distinction trivial, to my mind.

and yes, I could have a pair that is "contains no red" and "contains
no red, except for the koan that is a single piece and that piece is
an upright red queen".  But that *trivially* distinguishes the two
rules by a single koan, and thus to my mind is uninteresting.

If we move away from using the Null Koan (as that can potentially be
interpreted multiple ways), do rule-pairs exist such that a single
koan distinguishes between the two, without that single koan being
explicitly or obviously stated in one (or both) of the rules?  (For
some definition of "obviously" ;) )

And, just to note, I'm not necessarily planning on using such rules,
it's just a bit of mental masturbation to examine the possibilities.

Timothy