search

etwa-rsc / rules

A copy of the rules of tiddlywinks, with changes tracked
0 stars 0 forks source link

Inconsistent units #9

Open timhunt opened 5 years ago

timhunt commented 5 years ago

Almost all the measurements in the rules were updated to metric units (mm and cm), with one notable exception: the dimensions of the mat are 3 ft by 6 ft.

Some people would like to fix this, but a formal proposal to do this was put a rules meeting (I think using the metric size 91.5 cm by 183 cm) but was voted down.

One could argue that winks is a traditional British game, so keeping this one set of imperial measures in the rules is fitting, particularly because the close metric values are ugly.

fluppeteer commented 5 years ago

I've no problem with 3' and 6' (not that we ever have a table the full size anyway) - if anyone cares about metric, they can work out 3 or 6 x 12 x 2.54 themselves (it's not like there isn't an exact definition). 2m x 1m is substantially bigger, for example, and I agree that 180cm x 90cm looks weird and arbitrary. While I generally think in metric, I think we could have stuck with the 1"-to-2" squidger range too, and I was there for that one; we had to mess up the numbers anyway to accommodate 2" squidgers.

hatj2 commented 5 years ago

British Felt (and presumably at least some other suppliers) supply from a 180cm roll. Ed felt (haha) that the optimal mat, provided there's a surface big enough to put it on, is a big wink's width bigger than the playing area all the way around (which would also go some way to solving the 'piles across the boundary' problem) - but if the reality is that we buy felt of a given width, it seems silly to stipulate anything too exact that is different from that.

fluppeteer commented 5 years ago

Oh. That's embarrassing. Okay, in that case maybe we should go with 180x90cm. Mats do stretch a bit, and cutting them exactly is very tricky, but 2cm out is borderline significant.

fluppeteer commented 5 years ago

Incidentally, after fun with the derivation of a baseline in #3, if we go with 180x90cm because mats actually are that size, presumably we'd also want the baseline to be 90cm from the centre of the mat. That makes the edges of the mat behind the baseline ~23.75cm by ~11.88cm rather than ~24.13cm by 12.07cm. I guess you could argue that, after a bit of rounding 23.8x11.9 is less nice than 24.1x12, although if there's any mat out there with baselines marked to fractional mm, I'll eat it.

fluppeteer commented 5 years ago

To go out of my way to fail to procrastinate the work I need to do...

SimpleBaselinesMetric.pdf