Illogical

I was visiting a friend a few days ago and ended up playing games with her 8-year-old daughter. First we tried Monopoly, but I was too lazy to count money. Then the young girl suggested Snakes and Ladders. I hadn't played Snakes and Ladders in ages and thought why not. But, my gaming partner had her own set of rules which I only realized as she was beating me quite convincingly.

According to her new rules, if a ladder was in your block, no matter if it isn't the start of the ladder, you can climb it. I completely agreed, but then argued that logically the same should apply to the snakes. If a snake is more than halfway into your block, same as with the ladder, you should go down. The little girl laughed at me! She said that didn't make any sense. You can climb up unto a ladder next to you, but a snake can only swallow you with its mouth. It can't open its body and suck you in like that!

I burst out laughing. This girl's common sense had beaten my logic. We carried on with these rules until she had beaten me three times. Then I distracted her with candy. Or did she distract me? I can't recall :-).

This reminded me of Terry Pratchett's Discworld. Most things work on common sense in Discworld. You can see the horizon is a straight line so the world must and is flat. I sometimes wonder which is better - common sense or pure logic :-D.