This diary is frivolous. If you don't like frivolousness (even when it has a chance of becoming frivolity), then I'm sorry for rattling your cage. Get out while you can!
For the past few days, the front page feature box has shown a graphic linking to a story on the 4/26 DKos/SEIC PPP poll dealing with the intensity gap. It looks like this:
The first things I noticed about it was that (1) someone is going to win and (2) you can't figure out who it is without knowing who moved first. (The third thing I noticed is that the colors are reversed. Weird. Why?) Something about that second point nagged at me. I thought that it might be possible to figure out who went first by seeing what moves could have led to that position. Easy, right? Some protracted time later, I came to a tentative conclusion: I don't think that this is an end game that you can reach in tic-tac-toe with two rational players, meaning players who will take the win as soon as they can get it.
I write this diary to see if anyone else can solve this puzzle more appealingly.
Note: In this diary I'll refer to the top row of spaces (after rotating the board about 40 degrees clockwise), from left to right, as "1," "2" and "3." The middle row is similarly, "4," "5" and "6"; the bottom row "7," "8" and "9." In other words, space 8 is the empty one.
Here's the problem: to get into this position, the "winning final move" for the player who moved first must not have been available on the previous turn. If it had been available, then as a rational player they would have taken it!
This means that one of four pieces must have been played as the 8th move: 2 or 5 (if red donkey went first) or 7 or 9 (if blue elephant went first.)
On the 7th move, one of whichever pair didn't contribute to the 8th move must likewise have been played.
Proceed back through the game and you'll find that there's at least one move that would have had to be made that doesn't make sense. That or I'm missing something.
So, I want to see if anyone else can make this a sensible game. Show your work!
Of course, there's one other possibility: there's a variant of tic-tac-toe where the object is not to win, but to force the other player to win. I'm not sure what to call it -- I've usually called it "playing to lose" --, so let's try "toe-tac-tic." What I'm not sure of is whether this could be a valid game of "toe-tac-tic."
Of course, if they're playing to lose, that's a pretty wild metaphor for the article, isn't it?
But that's not what the graphic was supposed to mean. (Was it?)
I look forward to seeing if anyone can solve this puzzle -- if it is solvable.