From Philosophical Research
# Can anyone help add my "wave score"?
I've been idly working on a parallel combination game called "wavebuilder". That part mostly isn't important, but in the process I created a **numerical scoring system for elements**, and I'm wondering if anyone who is already familiar with Firefox extensions (or even Chrome, but I definitely want a Firefox one) could add this scoring system to an extension like Infinite Craft Helper. (It might also be neat to see on a database like InfiniBrowser.)
Basically it works like this:
* An element's **sum** starts at 1 and is calculated as the sum of the two elements that created it. If the same element is combined twice, one of them is considered to have a sum of 1.
* An element's **moves** count is simply the number of combinations required to create it, measured as the longest path from a parent element plus 1.
* An element's score is listed as **sum:moves**, like this: `Gargoyle 14:6`
* I also sometimes found it interesting to list elements with their largest possible *sum*: `Airship = 14:8 / 85`
* I usually just call this system the "wavebuilder score", although it could maybe be called the "wave score" or something.
* In my opinion the "canonical" score for an element is the lowest one — within reasonable limits of a palette of ~2000 elements or less.
* (This would mean that to be properly accurate, the extension would have to recalculate all the elements that depend on a given element, but that's a problem for whoever wants to code in JavaScript. I haven't actually coded this into my program yet.)
___
If you can understand Lisp, these are the exact algorithms currently used for sum and moves:
```
(defun hyle-sum-+ (a b) ; add up element sums to produce result sum
(max
(if (equal (hyle-id a) (hyle-id b))
(+ (hyle-sum a) 1)
(+ (hyle-sum a) (hyle-sum b)))
1))
(defun hyle-moves-+ (a b) ; add up element moves
(+ 1 (max (hyle-moves a) (hyle-moves b))))
```
___
I think I'm most interested in seeing how ridiculously huge the sums on people's First Discoveries get, although this has many other possible uses, like finding the *smallest* sum or moves score for an element (which is basically what I designed it for).
If you have any thoughts on how to improve this scoring system such as other metrics to add — maybe there's some great insight from advanced mathematics on networks of combining elements that I missed? maybe there are crazy patterns to First Discoveries I didn't think about? — feel free to share them. I would gladly add a good metric to wavebuilder for what it counts for (the project is very unfinished), but in general I feel like Infinite Craft guides need better analysis tools so we can really start finding and discussing interesting patterns.
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