From: chrisley@oxford.ac.uk (Ronald L Chrisley)
Newsgroups: alt.music.progressive
Subject: Proposal for a game:  proglink
Date: 12 Oct 92 15:53:32 GMT
Organization: School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences, Univ. of Sussex


Here's an idea for a "game" that we can play on the net.

One person posts the names of two groups.  The challenge is for people
to come up with the shortest chain of "links" between those groups.
What do I mean by a "link" between groups A and B?  An instance of at
least one of the members of group A playing with at least one of the
members of group B.

So, here's an example:  Frankie Goes to Hollywood => Marillion

One answer would be:

FGTH: Steve Howe
YES: Bruford
GENESIS: Banks
"Shortcut to Somewhere": Fish
MARILLION

But two shorter, and therefore better answers, would be:

FGTH: Steve Howe
GTR: Jonathan Mover
MARILLION


FGTH: Steve Howe
PROPAGANDA: Mosley
MARILLION

Now, we can make this more interesting, by adding further criteria for one chain being "better" than another.

Recorded links are better than unrecorded links (like saying "Wakeman
played with Wetton in this pre-UK trio with Bruford")

Official links are better than bootleg-only links (eg Bruford in Gong,
I think)

Studio links are better than live-only links (eg Bruford in Genesis)

Links with artists playing on same track are better than ones where
the artists just happen to be on the same album.

And, just to be perverse, multiple album links between artists are
worse than single links.  That is, the Jonathan Mover chain above
would be preferred to the Mosley one, since Mover only recorded a few
tracks with Marillion, while Mosley has recorded several albums.

The first few criteria are to make things easier to verify, while the
last one is to make things more interesting.  It's easy to think of
non-tenuous connections between Asia and King Crimson (Wetton), but it
takes a little more knowledge to make the weaker Lake connection
(which loses some points for being a live link only).

Scoring: the length of a chain = the number of people mentioned in the
chain.  To this you add 1 point for every time one of your links
contains one of the undesirable elements in the 4 criteria mentioned
above (for the 4th criteria, add 1 if there is more than one release
on which the two appeared; for tie-breakers, add the number of
different releases minus 1; WARNING: this might take a while to
compute, and may not terminate.  Might be best to accept a tie!).

EG:  

FGTH: Steve Howe
YES: Bruford
GENESIS: Banks
"Shortcut to Somewhere": Fish
MARILLION

= 4 +
1 (since Bruford didn't record studio with Genesis, only live)
1 (since Bruford was on ~7 Yes albums with Howe)
= 6

FGTH: Steve Howe
GTR: Jonathan Mover
MARILLION
= 2 +
1 if Mover didn't do the remixes for MSH & 3Boats; I forget
= 3?

FGTH: Steve Howe
PROPAGANDA: Mosley
MARILLION
= 2

If the scoring seems open-ended, that's ok: it should be part of the
fun!  If asked, I will serve as arbiter to any dispute ;-)

The person who proposes a link should ensure that at least one chain
exists...

Let's try it.

Here's a first try:  ELP and Black Sabbath

To save bandwidth, only post if your link is lower than any so far
(include your score).

If you think this is dumb, don't flame me.


--
Ronald L. Chrisley  ronc@cogs.susx.ac.uk
COGS, University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QH, UK
Newsgroups: alt.music.progressive