Click cells to fill up the grid as much as you can without any red X's, and when you've got a good enough, unique pattern you can save it to the database and move up the leaderboard.
When start the game, you're presented with a 10 by 10 grid filled with 0s. If you click on any of these 0s, it lights up blue and a 1 is put inside. You can keep doing this until one lights up red, with an X inside. This means that the pattern is redundant- two or more of your marks have the same pairwise distance. Your next move will clear the red X, or click it again to dismiss it.
On top of the grid, there is "Grid size: " followed by two number input boxes. The first controls the number of rows, the second controls the number of columns. You can play on any size grid you like, and you may find it easier to find good patterns for large grids because they haven't been explored as much. But be warned, resizing the grid will clear all your selections. Beside the grid size controls, at the right corner there are the words "fill factor(%): " and "Marks: ". Marks counts the number of boxes you've selected, and fill factor is the ratio of marks to the size of your grid.
You can select any size grid to play with- but if the grid becomes too big for your screen, you'll notice a horizontal scrollbar appear at the bottom. You can scroll within the grid box to see the other rows.
Once you have reached a certain fill factor, a popup will occur to prompt you to save it to the database. The popup has two tabs- if you're playing as a user, just click submit (if you don't have an account, check out our our registration page, you need one to play). The other tab is for entering patterns from published papers. Once you save, you can keep playing, and each new save will be recorded as a distinct pattern in the database- each is valuable to our research. You may have a pattern that is above the fill factor without being prompted- this is because it is already in our database. Keep playing, and you'll eventually find one.
Below the grid, there are four buttons- "Save Configuration", "Clear board", "Export to CSV", and "Export to MATLAB". The first allows you to manually prompt the game to save, if the pattern is valid (unique and not already in the database). The "clear board" button clears all of your selections, resetting the board. Export to CSV (comma seperated values) exports the array for use in spreadsheet applications, and export to MATALAB exports for use with the mathematical programming language MATLAB
In a seperate box below the game, is a grid labelled "Auto-Correlation Matrix". It is changed automatically as you play, and has to do with the mathematics involved in verifying a golomb pattern. Check out our all about Golomb patterns page for more info on the mathematics behind the game!
Check out our info page about the mathematics behind the game