Setup and Rule Diagrams

[James Finch]

Hi Juan,

The distributions would be interchangeable between manufacturing plants except for the F only ever having a single executive visit. While this doesn't matter to the 3-1-1 distribution, as it contains two single executive groups any one of which could go on any day, it does constrain the 2-2-1 distribution, as the 1 in that distribution must be the F plant. That means that in that distribution Day 3 will always have two executives as F must go on either day 1 or 2; the flip side of this inference, that either Day 1 or Day 2 will have F and thus only 1 executive, is actually the answer to question 22. Otherwise I don't see any inferences to make off the distributions alone; instead the ratio of local to global questions here is hinting that we need more information to make more inferences.

Hope this clears things up!

[mollyquillin]

I have a question about recognizing this game as Advanced Linear and not Linear/Grouping... I'm not sure if it actually matters at the end of the day, but I set this question up like it was Linear/Grouping and not Advanced Linear, which really messed me up in the questions the first time around. I absolutely recognized the linearity in this game, I just saw "F/H/M" variables as more groups than a second variable in an advanced linear game... (I also played this game last and timed this section poorly, which could also explain my poor performance...)

How do we recognize this as Advanced Linear, rather than Linear/Grouping? Jon's set up and diagram above really cleared this game up for me as a two-tier stack with three spaces each, and therefore Advanced Linear, but I would love to be able to recognize this for myself (rather than assuming it's Linear/Grouping)! Thank you so much for the advice!

[Paul Marsh]

Hey mollyquillin! Good question.

In a Linear/Grouping combination game, the Grouping element comes first. We're looking to distribute our variables into groups, and then we're ordering within (oftentimes just one of) those groups. Again, we are not ordering the groups themselves, but rather we are ordering within the groups. For example, the most typical Linear/Grouping combination is an In/Out grouping game where we're ordering the In group (we sort the variables into the groups, and then order the In group).

On the other hand, even in an atypical Advanced Linear game like this one, our primary concern is ordering. We are not distributing first and ordering second; rather we're just constantly ordering all our variable sets. We can see that in this game: our first rule sees us ordering the "manufacturing plants" variable set, while our fourth rule sees us ordering the "executives" variable set.

So a general rule of thumb if you are having a tough time deciding between the two might be: Are we ordering just within a group or groups? If so, it's probably a combination Grouping/Linear game. Whereas if you notice that your "groups" themselves are actually being ordered, then it's likely that they're not groups at all but rather another variable set in an Advanced Linear game.

Hope that helps!