Talk:Conway's Soldiers

Untitled[edit]

So what is the point of the game? Why can soldiers only get four squares above the horizontal line? Or is that a rule? --MarSch 17:10, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Denni, for the link and clear up. I've done some more clearing up, since it wasn't clear to me that jumping involved jumping over another soldier (until I read the link). Without this insight I also misunderstood the removing of the soldier. Moving would have been pretty pointless with these rules. I know of John Conway, mostly his Conway's Game of Life, but I didn't know about this game or maybe I forgot. --MarSch 11:28, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose you've already figured this out, but for anyone who does not know it is not a rule that soldiers can not get four places over the line, it is a mathematical impossibility. It's not literally a "game" as one might think of it (a competition, board game, video game, etc.), but a mathematical game, an experiment in mathematics. -Leif902 23:06, 24 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Squares marked B[edit]

This is probably obvious to everyone but me, but what is the significance of the squares marked "B"? Wanderer57 (talk) 20:42, 28 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

They are an alternative to the men marked "A". In other words, you could remove the "A" men and put them at "B" and you can still march forward to the same finishing location. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gibell (talk • contribs) 23:14, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Source for origin of puzzle[edit]

Is there any source regarding the fact that the puzzle was first considered by Conway in 1961? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Natematic (talk • contribs) 00:11, 20 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Reaching the 5th row[edit]

The whole point here seems to be the idea that the 5th row is unreachable, along with an impressive mathematical proof. Problem is that this guy does reach the fifth row, complete with animations: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/solarmy/ DavesPlanet (talk) 18:25, 13 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Conway proved that, regardless of the strategy used, there is no finite series of moves that will allow a soldier to advance more than four rows above the horizontal line.

This guy made it by dropping away the 'finite' requirement from the initial task. --77.120.41.69 (talk) 00:28, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Confusing notation[edit]

This article uses $\varphi ={\frac {{\sqrt {5}}-1}{2}}=0.61803\dots$ . This is confusing as $\varphi$ normally denotes the golden ratio ${\frac {{\sqrt {5}}+1}{2}}=1.61803\dots$ , which is the reciprocal of this one. I don't know of a standard notation for the number used here, but in Golden_ratio#Golden_ratio_conjugate it is called $\Phi$ (capital phi instead of lowercase phi). I suggest we replace $\varphi$ with $\Phi$ everywhere in this article. Capriol (talk) 22:16, 18 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

QED[edit]

The proof has both a "this completes the proof" and a "QED". That's basically saying the same thing twice. One of them ought to be removed. 62.216.5.216 (talk) 10:36, 30 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Edit request: reference links to the wrong person[edit]

This edit request by an editor with a conflict of interest has now been answered.

The reference "TathamTaylor" currently includes a link to Gareth Taylor. However, Gareth Taylor is a football manager, and not the mathematician who wrote the paper. I think this should be corrected by removing the author2-link parameter from the template. I have a conflict of interest in that I know Dr Taylor personally. --bjh21 (talk) 02:02, 3 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]