I enjoyed this article, although now I'm a little intimidated to play against you at our next family gathering. Good thing I play for enjoyment and not to win. :-)
I got the max length fairly easily as well (though not sure how to measure "easy"). Having no 12s, one 11, and 2 0s, one of which was attached to the 11, narrowed the search space a lot.
From my play, I feel that tile counting can pay dividends in the end game (if someone draws a tile with only a few dominos left, you know all those available numbers are unplayable for them) but I suspect the majority of the time it will turn a loss into a slightly smaller loss.
Also, it would help those of us who wanted to try if the dominos from the sample were ordered in some way :)
I was able to get the 20-tile train easily enough. Guess I am better than I thought. I enjoyed the article and your thorough analysis.
I enjoyed this article, although now I'm a little intimidated to play against you at our next family gathering. Good thing I play for enjoyment and not to win. :-)
I got the max length fairly easily as well (though not sure how to measure "easy"). Having no 12s, one 11, and 2 0s, one of which was attached to the 11, narrowed the search space a lot.
From my play, I feel that tile counting can pay dividends in the end game (if someone draws a tile with only a few dominos left, you know all those available numbers are unplayable for them) but I suspect the majority of the time it will turn a loss into a slightly smaller loss.
Also, it would help those of us who wanted to try if the dominos from the sample were ordered in some way :)