In a lock with six pin stacks with a uniform chance of a pin setting at either shear line, the probability of a picked lock actually opening is only 1/64. Picking techniques for these locks involve the use of special torque tools designed to put torque on only one of the two concentric plugs. Left: The correct key lifts the pin stacks to align the cuts at the shear line. These imperfections are very small -- as little as .0001 inches in some cases -- but they are what allow us to manipulate ("pick") locks open without using the correct key. The second case is an ideal gas: a lot of little ideal particles in an ideal box. The box insulates everything but (Newtonian) gravity to make things simpler. Again we know everything: the starting conditions are known completely, the box is completely understood &c &c. And you know he might even rush over without putting all his clothes on, as smitten as he is with the ladies-who-can't-cook down the street.

When we want to put something down we say it has no future. I added the tiles, but he hacked the rotations and put together the graphics. The disks are connected in sequence via interlocking cams such that one rotation of the dial engages the first disk, two rotations engage the second, and so on. The first case is billiards, and we’ll consider a completely idealised billiard table: completely smooth, flat and rigid, completely round balls with completely known properties (so how elastic they are etc), and the same for the cushions. Now we want to predict this system forwards and we’ll use the same criterion for failure: when some particle leaves a collision 90 degrees out from where we predict. Now we want to predict where the balls go, and we’ll say that the prediction fails when a ball leaves a collision 90 degrees from where we predicted - it’s obvious that after that point we can’t usefully predict anything. It’s a cue sport where the player strikes the billiard balls, moving them around the table. You’ll see it played on TV and in movies, see tables set up in bars and hotels, and it’s very likely that you’ve tried your hand at it yourself at some point.

Billiard tables shaped like acute and right triangles have periodic trajectories. The billiard balls and cues are supplied as standard with all our billiard and pool tables. Without getting too technical, a 7ft or 8ft pool table is the general standard size. Snooker is organised into frames, meaning the player wins one by one by getting the most points. The winner is the player with the most points at the end. It's hard to learn these skills all at once on off-the-shelf commercial locks, but that's what many people who try to learn lock picking end up doing (before giving up in frustration). We don’t know one thing: there are some people standing around the table, and we don’t know where they are, what is billiards so we don’t know what their gravitational fields look like. So when you do something, people ask: what hit you? ’ Although they may seem similar, the two games are very different, and hard to confuse once you know the basics of each.

And this time we also know everything about the rest of the universe as well: we don’t need to predict it forward, we’re just given all the data about how it evolves (in fact I think that without loss of generality we can assume an empty universe outside the box, which reduces the data volume considerably). Except that there’s an electron at the edge of the universe and we don’t know where it is (apart from how far away it is), and so again we don’t know its gravitiational field. For both of them imagine a universe where everything is completely Newtonian, so no quantum mechanics in particular. While pool billiards is the most widely recognised and popular cue sport, other games like snooker, carom billiards, and three-cushion billiards offer their own unique challenges and rewards. This page contains prototypes of games that are experiments in game design. You can download the full game (14 megabytes), or else just look at the Read Me, which contains some interesting gameplay philosophy from the playtesters. You can download the full game (7 megabytes), or else just look at the Read Me. That idea by itself is not enough to make a game.