Places lived

Mom

Brunswick, ME

Sicily, Italy

(?), NJ

Sicily, Italy [Dad did two stints as a Navy pilot in the Mediterranean. Mom moved near the base both times so I could get some Dad time while I was an infant]

Harpswell, ME

Thopsham, ME

Portland, ME [Grades 1-5]

Yarmouth, ME [Grades 6-12]

Chicago, IL [4 years college +3 years hanging around]

Glasgow, Scotland [1 year, Client-Centered Therapy training]

Jamaica Plain, MA [1 year]

Somerville, MA [4 addresses in 6 years]

Describe in a few words what you found interesting about your own list. What about your moving history is moving to you? Did you see anything new by putting it all in a list?

I moved great distances and into huge cities without hesitation, even though I'd lived in Maine for all my conscious life, in no town larger than Portland (~50K people, smaller than Somerville). Both the Chicago and the Glasgow moves were 100% motivated by education.

I'm also happy to observe that on finishing my training in Scotland, I homed in on where I wanted to *live* very accurately. By the time I landed in Boston I knew it would be Boston, Chicago, or Seattle. By the end of a year in Boston (JP) I knew I wanted to be in Davis Square. Only later did I gradually discover the Suspects community.

(no subject)

This is an interesting toy from a scientific perspective.

The process is akin to trying to get a self-sustaining nuclear reaction going. Every moving particle has N% chance of triggering another particle, sometimes two.

The boards it leaves behind are akin to a ferrous metal cooled in a magnetic field -- regions of identical orientation.

The longer this random process goes on, the more ordered the board appears at the end. That challenges a common-sense understanding of entropy -- how does the starting board have more energy than the ending board? Analogous to crystal formation (warm, disordered solid dissolved in liquid loses energy and forms cool, ordered crystals).

The corners and edges are dampeners due to their exposure to non-reactive locations. So a board-spanning reaction will always take the form of a substance cooling from the outside in.

Game-comments... the best board to start from is one that has few snakes and doughnuts, and few white bands where pieces point away from each other on each side. It's good to start in an area with many layers of surrounding pieces tending to point inward. Nirvana is a reaction in which several areas of activity are turning pieces toward each other.

Sometimes pieces turn more than 90 degrees. I believe this happens when on arrival at 90 at least one of the reactive surfaces is pointing at a piece that isn't done turning, in which case an opportunity to react on that face would be missed. It would greatly dampen reactive areas otherwise.

It's impossible to create a looping condition. Any set of tiles that might be proposed to be involved in a loop have corners among them which would shut off. If the board edges wrapped (ie it's a doughnut), this form of proof wouldn't work. Yet my sense is it'd still be impossible to get a looping condition, since the ordered regions always get larger and fewer over time. Would like to play with that!

My best score: 2605