Charles Gilman wrote on Sun, Jan 18, 2004 10:27 AM UTC:
Yes, I did mean squares of distances. The base-36 was simply a way to
represent every distance as a single character.
Regarding Jared McComb's comments, the cells in this game ARE rhombic
dodecahedrons, I just thought that that was too much information to
include in my own comment, and the orthogonals are indeed at right angles
to the boundaries they pass through. The view presented uses one of the
square cross-sections, but an alternative view of the same game would be a
pyramid with a single cell with progressively larger triangles of cells
viewed in hex cross-section below.