Rule of 8 finer details question

[Gerard_Amatin]

(Question at bottom of this post)

Hacking has a ‘rule of 8’:

Before 8 it is bait.

Or in clearer terms, the core will be placed at least 8 nodes away from the starting node if possible.

This means it’s best to quickly move 8 nodes away from the starting node to search for the core.

However, I said “if possible”, because on some board layouts it is impossible for the core to be 8 nodes away from the start, most notably when the start node is in the middle of the board.

This causes fun images like these to show up on reddit, where the core is totally randomly placed and can happen to be very close to the start node:

However, some of such ‘core at first node’ posts show a board where the rule of 8 definitely was possible!

See this one for example:

There were two valid candidates for the core to be 8 nodes away from the start.

Yet still the game decided to ignore the rule of 8 and fall back to random placement.

My question is this:

How many valid candidates are needed for the game to consider the rule of 8?

Does anyone know? With this image above and a couple of others it appears to me the threshold seems to be at least 3, but if anyone knows more or has examples with even more valid candidates where the rule of 8 is still ignored I’d love to hear!

[Dyver_Phycad]

In my experience, this rule (wasn’t it rule of 6?) is bogus. A far more reliable rule is: rush to the corners.

[Gerard_Amatin]

The rule of 6 is something else and means a node surrounded by 6 neighbours has no encounters, with as exception that a defense node can occupy it if the core is next to that node.

The rule of 8 also has an exception, which is why it can appear to be bogus because the core can be much closer to the start in the exceptional case.

What I’m trying to figure out is the threshold for that exceptional case to trigger.

[Dyver_Phycad]

Does it ever “fall back to random” or is it always random? In my experience, there is no logical rule behind the placement of the node, besides it trending towards the edges. As far as I can tell, spending time on thinking about where a node is before you start hacking is a waste of time and just going for edges is much quicker.

[Gerard_Amatin]

Talking about wastes of time, I’ve been building a hacking simulator where I try to totally recreate the rules of the original hacking minigame.

So yes, I do wish to spend time thinking where the node can be, as I’m trying to get perfect understanding of this minigame.

And generally the core is 8 steps away, unless the start point is somewhere in the middle and thus closer than 8 steps to the majority of nodes.

What I do not know yet is at exactly which moment the game switches from using the rule of 8 to random placement.

So far my theory is that it happens when the amount of valid candidates is ‘too low’ where ‘too low’ is at least 2, but could be more.