Setup and Rule Diagrams

[Adam Tyson]

I would not describe those two dogs that don't get ribbons as being part of a linear setup, exactly, ange.li6778. They are just the "out" group, and there is nothing to distinguish between them (there is no 5th place that is ahead of 6th place). But there IS a sort of linear idea there in that a dog that gets a ribbon is placed ahead of a dog that does not get one (unlike a game in which a group of variables is selected from a larger group, and then only the selected group is placed in some order). The two dogs without ribbons are neither before or after each other, but they are both after the four dogs that get ribbons.

We should always track the out group, especially if we have information that indicates all the variables have additional characteristics that can be tracked. That doesn't happen very often, though! I'm thinking of, for example, the infamous Toy Dinosaur game from PT 57 (viewtopic.php?f=156&t=1452), in which the colors of the toys only matter if the toys are part of the group that is displayed, so we don't have to worry about what color to assign to the two toy dinos that are in the out group. Off the top of my head I cannot think of another game where multiple characteristics must be tracked even within the out group, just this one, which is part of the reason this one gets in the "killer games" hall of fame!

So how do we know that we should track that info in this case? Because the rules told us about the genders of all 6 dogs, not just the 4 that get ribbons, and because the sequence included 5 of the variables and not just the 4 that get ribbons, Those are clues that we need to pay more attention to the characteristics of the "out" pair more than in a typical in/out game (and this may not even be properly called an in/out game for that reason).