Talk:Icosian game

Icosian game has been listed as one of the Sports and recreation good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Review: July 1, 2024. (Reviewed version).

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Toys

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A fact from Icosian game appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 24 May 2024 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that although the icosian game was advertised as a "highly amusing game for the drawing room", it was too easy to play and not a commercial success?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2024/May. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Icosian game.

Wikipedia

Untitled

Please help extend this article. Ishmael Rufus (talk) 14:49, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

external link

Icosian game in flash might be called "icosian" but it actually asks for an Eulerian circuit, not for a Hamilton cycle. So it doesn't belong here. McKay (talk) 00:24, 22 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Launchballer talk 10:31, 16 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

(

Comment or view
Article history

)

... that although the icosian game was advertised as "a highly amusing game for the drawing room", it was too easy to play and few copies were sold?

Source: For quote from 1859 ad, see Turner (1987); for the claims that it was too easy and not successful see Sowell (2001), https://scholarship.claremont.edu/hmnj/vol1/iss24/14 (and note the dates of these are pre-Wikipedia, too early to be circular references)

Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Rosal, Sutherland

5x expanded by David Eppstein (talk).

Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 183 past nominations.

Post-promotion hook changes will be logged on the talk page; consider watching the nomination until the hook appears on the Main Page.

—David Eppstein (talk) 06:51, 27 April 2024 (UTC).[reply]

Date, expansion, hook, close paraphrase check, QPQ checks out. --Soman (talk) 11:11, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review

Passed. —Kusma (talk) 16:05, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

This review is transcluded from Talk:Icosian game/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 17:52, 9 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Kusma (talk · contribs) 10:23, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Will review this later today or tomorrow. —Kusma (talk) 10:23, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Content and prose review

I will comment on anything I notice, but not all of my comments will be strictly related to the GA criteria, so not everything needs to be actioned. Feel free to push back if you think I am asking too much, and please tell me when I am wrong.

Lead section: fairly short, not sure it summarises the entire article
perhaps rewrite "a cycle using edges of the dodecahedron that passes through all its vertices" without using the jargon "cycle"? something like "a closed path through the vertices of the dodeca along its edges that passes through each of them exactly once", but easier to understand?
Game play: again, try to explain jargon "cycle"?
I couldn't really imagine what the "partially flattened dodecahedron with handle attached" looked like without checking out the photograph in the source. That is probably my limited imagination.
"The game was too easy to play to achieve much popularity" How difficult was the two player version? (Is it possible to complete any path to a Hamiltonian cycle if four/five/six initial vertices are given??)
History: "only a £25 licensing fee" consider giving context on how much that is, for example by using {{inflation}} (I am aware that this is a rather imperfect tool).
Which of the two versions of the game do the two surviving specimens belong to?
Legacy: would it be worth elaborating on one of the recreational maths or combinatorial game theory things that you hint at?

Well written overall, just a little bit of jargon that might do with explaining more on first use. —Kusma (talk) 15:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Source spotchecks

Numbering from Special:PermanentLink/1225490294.

1a,b: ok
3b,c: fine.
5a/6a: ok, but in an ideal world I'd like to see the original source for "too easy". You omit that they say Hamilton himself used Icosian calculus to solve the problems, which is much harder than trial and error... and is a neat anecdote, but do you not trust this enough to repeat it?
10a: fine.
10b: I can't see that these were "other" versions.
13: fine; might be worth upgrading to an external link because of the nice colour photographs of both versions
19–24: a single source mentioning that these are popular would be nicer than this collection of citations (these are more like typical citations in a mathematical research article than typical Wikipedia citations).

One small issue, no major concerns. —Kusma (talk) 16:17, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

General comments and GA criteria

Good Article review progress box

Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV ()

3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant ()

Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

Well written, perhaps assuming a tiny bit too much knowledge of graph theory terminology.
Lead is a bit short (two versions, very few copies extant, symmetry of solutions are possible things to mention).
No other issues with MoS.
Good sources, well formatted. Just one query regarding source-to-text fidelity.
Slightly more on the actual gameplay of the "game" would be great (and trial/error versus other strategies), otherwise it is broad enough.
Images are free and suitably captioned.
Remaining criteria are fine.

A nice little article, not much to do here other than perhaps commenting more on the "boring game" (You nominated the article as a "game", not as "mathematics", so perhaps it would be good to try to expand this). —Kusma (talk) 16:26, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I think I've addressed almost everything.

Lead expanded.
"Cycle" (except in "Hamiltonian cycle") replaced by "polygon", as a term that should still be familiar but with less confusion over its meaning.
Expanded description of partially flattened dodecahedron.
Re "other versions": changed to "versions".
Re converting the puzzle museum source to an external link: I don't like having external links that duplicate references, and we need this as a reference for the existence of few copies. But I added a note to the reference about the color photos.
Re "too easy": sources don't specify whether they mean one-player puzzles or two-player games, but I think the two-player game was really something like one player setting a puzzle for the other, so the distinction may not mean much. I added a much earlier source for it being too easy, expanding on Hamilton's defense from that source and Darling's note about Hamilton doing it the hard way.
Used the inflation template to convert to something resembling modern value.
Described both museum versions as flat versions. The existence of a photo of the domed version in the puzzle museum website suggests that it also exists somewhere physically, but the location is not very clearly specified. I wasn't certain from that site whether the two photos were of items in the collection of the puzzle museum, or merely ones that they had obtained photographic access to.
Re the source for the combinatorial game theory work: replaced five academic papers with one textbook chapter and one academic paper (the original one, according to the textbook).
Re "more on the actual gameplay": I think the only currently listed sources that address this are Ahrens and Lucas. I don't read German at all (and French not very well) but my impression is that the main content they provide on gameplay is what the single Hamiltonian cycle on the dodecahedron (up to isomorphism) looks like and how to remember it. I think that's not really much more than what can be seen in the figure of the "Game play" section. But I added a paragraph based on Lucas.

—David Eppstein (talk) 01:04, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good changes overall. I would prefer a two-paragraph lead to a three-paragraph one given the length, but that is certainly not a reason to hold up promotion. Thank you for another Good Article! —Kusma (talk) 16:04, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.