The Adventures of JStar88 on The Blue Marble

Finding calm amid intersecting vertices

I was playing a series of $1 ultra turbo Sit & Go tournies at UB earlier tonight while eating dinner and watching a Chinese-language kung fu movie with subtitles in Swedish (occasionally looking up words whenever I had a WTF moment). To completely submerge my temporarily ADD-sodden mind in the violent calm of torrential information overload, I arranged data points in a cool new planar graphing game I've found called Planarity.

And yes, I did just say "a cool new planar graphing game." And no, I have not been fully immersed in some fresh mathematical hell. It's cool. Check it out.

The goal of Planarity is to arrange a series of vertices so that none of them intersect. While it's dead-easy at level one, it gets a tad insane when you pass level 10.

I completely zoned out of reality as I alt-tabbed back and forth between planarity and ub, playing geometrical analyst one moment and psychoanalytical calculist the other - while still munching on pasta and frequently gazing up upon hearing a menacing Kiyup!

For a few hours, my mind was not on this earth...

I placed first in three of seven tournaments, and second in two others. That meant my $7 in entry fees paid back $21 in winnings. Proportionately, the ROI was way better than almost all of my acquaintances did in this year's WSOP. :)

It's much easier for me to play a tight, disciplined game when I'm not bored by the lack of action. Also, bluffing was far more convincing when I only saw one of every three or four flops.

I played Planarity up through level 14 and found amazing calm through sorting, arranging and re-arranging its many vertices. Small problems like these are always fun to solve, particularly each time a hard study of the patterns finally provides the mental breakthrough for a resolution.

Level 15 gave me a headache just to look at. I chose to quit when my brain and eyes begged for a reprieve from "games" and constant partial attention.

Here's a screen cap of level 12:



If you finish level 15 or go further, send me a screen cap.

Update: Planarity.net appears to be offline at the moment. There's a mirror of it here.

posted by jstar88 @ 12:33 AM