Sum to Fifteen (All About Perspective)

I got the idea for this game from a lecture I was watching, given by Scott E. Page. He gave the online course Model Thinking over at Coursera. He is a lecturer in Complex Systems at the University of Michigan.  He presents the idea of how perspectives have such a large influence in modelling data and problems, especially on the heuristics. This game idea originated with Herbert A. Simon, according to Scott.

Putting that all aside for one minute, I thought that it would be fun to use the concept to make a seemingly difficult AI from a relatively easy perspective. Took me a day of hacking around with code and I have the following.

Instructions

• select cards by clicking them
• try to get any combination where three cards add up to fifteen
• when the game is over, click to try again

Cards are from cards.virmir.com

The source is atrocious. I am ashamed to put my name on it, but this was a hack from the word go. So maybe I should call this a prototype and leave it at that. I even left the debug command in. If you find it, you will see a cryptic view of the game from another perspective, which makes playing the game “THAT” much easier. I made use of the Flixel framework to compile everything. Only really missed adding click-events to Sprites (the rest was awesome).

Lastly, if you have the time, I highly recommend going through the video lectures from Scott… he can really distil complicated topics into a short time really well. If you want to know more about how I implemented the AI, drop me an email and I will be happy to give you the low-down.