[jesterswilde]

Given how the article is laid out, I think it would be more appropriate to view the game from the lens of when we teach the operations in school, as opposed to what are fundamental or elementary operations / functions in math.

Though I also think square root is cheating, it has an implicit 2 inside of it, where as raising to the power of 2 and log 2 are explicit.

You could also argue for only infix operators.

A good game must be somewhat challenging or else it is not really a game. Anything that makes the game trivial ought be omitted for it to be a game.

[Karellen]

Yeah, thinking of the puzzle as a game, rather than a competition, allows for a different perspective.

If I think of a competition, then I'd expect the rules to be determined ahead of time according to some pre-imagined criteria. If someone manages to find a clever hack within the rules that allows for trivial "breaks", then that's good for them and they just get to beat everyone else at it.

But if I think of a game, then it's much more natural for the rules to adapt over time as people realise that some types of "play" make the game less fun, or straight-up boring. They don't have to be self-consistent, or logical. They're essentially arbitrary, and just whatever they need to be to make the game "better".