My only problem with this game was the extra difficulty associated with approaching it analytically if you don’t happen to know about mtg-style card games (I remember looking at the comments on the main post late last week and wondering what a ‘ramp’ was).
I actually considered this to be mostly a feature rather than a bug? I think real-world data science problems also benefit from having some knowledge of the domain in question.
It’s possible to apply data science techniques to a completely unfamiliar domain—you don’t need to know anything about card games to notice that ‘P’ and ‘S’ showing up together, or ‘L’ and ‘E’ showing up together, improves your payoff function, and to try submitting an answer that has lots of ‘P’s and lots of ’S’s in it.
But if you have some level of domain knowledge, you have more ability to guess what kind of patterns are likely to appear, and to extrapolate details. When you see that ‘L’ works well with ‘D’, ‘E’ and ‘A’ that doesn’t tell you much else: when you notice that ‘L’ works well with all three of the cards that have long and bombastic names, that lets you start guessing things like ‘there are some kind of costs to playing these powerful cards, and L helps you pay those costs to play them’. This lets you guess in turn things like ‘adding more Emperors might make the deck stronger against other decks like itself but weaker against faster decks’ that would be very hard to pull out of the data directly without some amount of domain knowledge to help.
This is part of the reason why I gave the cards names instead of just saying ‘Card ID 1’, ‘Card ID 2’, etc. (The other part is of course to sound cooler :P)
I actually considered this to be mostly a feature rather than a bug? I think real-world data science problems also benefit from having some knowledge of the domain in question.
It’s possible to apply data science techniques to a completely unfamiliar domain—you don’t need to know anything about card games to notice that ‘P’ and ‘S’ showing up together, or ‘L’ and ‘E’ showing up together, improves your payoff function, and to try submitting an answer that has lots of ‘P’s and lots of ’S’s in it.
But if you have some level of domain knowledge, you have more ability to guess what kind of patterns are likely to appear, and to extrapolate details. When you see that ‘L’ works well with ‘D’, ‘E’ and ‘A’ that doesn’t tell you much else: when you notice that ‘L’ works well with all three of the cards that have long and bombastic names, that lets you start guessing things like ‘there are some kind of costs to playing these powerful cards, and L helps you pay those costs to play them’. This lets you guess in turn things like ‘adding more Emperors might make the deck stronger against other decks like itself but weaker against faster decks’ that would be very hard to pull out of the data directly without some amount of domain knowledge to help.
This is part of the reason why I gave the cards names instead of just saying ‘Card ID 1’, ‘Card ID 2’, etc. (The other part is of course to sound cooler :P)
It’s definitely a feature as well; the exact tradeoff comes down to personal taste.