Show HN: Slices – puzzle game

I.e., my curiosity over whether I had learned a general solution to that class of puzzle kept my interest.

But more importantly, I enjoy purely perceptual tasks. There is almost no cognitive skill involved for example in piecing together a jigsaw puzzle or playing a game of billards. (At very high levels of skill, maybe billards demands significant cognitive work, e.g., leaving the table in a state designed to exploit weakness in one's opponent's skills, but that does not apply to the game under discussion.) Maybe the difference between you and I is that I enjoy purely perceptual tasks whereas you do not.

I'll disagree with your disagreement :)

Part of this is having played Myst in the 2010s (rather than in its heyday) and comparing it to its successors, but I enjoyed The Witness much more than Myst.

Myst falls down in the same way as many adventure-style games I've played, in that it has too few puzzles. Each one is self-contained, without much relation to any of the other puzzles in the game, and is dropped in your lap, fully-formed and fully-complex.

As a result, there's a lot of guess-and-check and you can kind of muddle through some of them without any understanding. As a result of that, while each of the puzzles has its own internal consistency, the whole thing feels very arbitrary.

In comparison, because The Witness has so many (over 600) puzzles, it is able to ease you into full understanding of their logic. You acquire a mastery of each individual mechanic over a series of puzzles, and nothing feels arbitrary or forced. Because all of them are the same kind of puzzle, it can combine mechanics with delightfully cohesive results. I really enjoy this kind of game design, it's the "show, don't tell" of progression (while Myst felt more "don't tell, but don't show either").

I will say that Myst is better at world-building than The Witness (despite The Witness feeling much more consistent). But I'd rather play a really good walking-simulator and a separate really good puzzle game than a half-baked adventure game combining the two.

(All of this isn't to say you shouldn't try Myst if you haven't. I'd recommend RealMyst for that.)

It gets more interesting after 20 levels.

    import numpy as np
    import z3
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    from sklearn.svm import LinearSVC
    from sklearn.cluster import KMeans

    def normalize(v):
        return v / np.sqrt(np.dot(v, v))

    def line_normal(v):
        return np.array([v[1], -v[0]])

    def line_segment_intersection_test(e0, e1):
        a, c, b, d = e0[0], e1[0], e0[1] - e0[0], e1[1] - e1[0]
        n = line_normal(b)
        l = np.dot(n, d)
        if l == 0:
            return False
        t1 = np.dot(n, a - c) / l
        if not 0  0).astype(np.long)
            svm = LinearSVC(C=1e9, loss='hinge', max_iter=10000)
            svm.fit(vertices, side)
            if svm.score(vertices, side) == 1:
                m, c = svm.coef_[0], svm.intercept_[0]
                dv = line_normal(m)
                if m[1] == 0:
                    v0 = np.array([-c/m[0], y_mean])
                else:
                    v0 = np.array([x_mean, -(c+m[0] * x_mean)/m[1]])
            else:
                print("SVM fitting failed: (falling back to grazing cut)")
            dv = normalize(dv)
            proj = np.sum((vertices - v0) * dv, axis=-1)
            proj_min, proj_max = np.min(proj), np.max(proj)
            proj_range = proj_max - proj_min
            refined_cuts.append([v0 + (proj_min - 0.1 * proj_range) * dv, v0 + (proj_max + 0.1 * proj_range) * dv])
        return refined_cuts

    vertices = np.random.uniform(-1, 1, (15, 2))
    n_clusters = 5
    k_means = KMeans(n_clusters=n_clusters).fit(vertices)
    labels = k_means.labels_
    islands = [[v for j, v in enumerate(vertices) if labels[j] == l] for l in range(n_clusters)]
    cuts = solve(islands)
    for island in islands:
        plt.scatter(*np.array(island).T, marker='+')
    for cut in cuts:
        plt.plot(*np.array(cut).T, color='black')
    plt.show()

The Witness got a lot of initial attention because of the author, but it is also one of the games I enjoyed playing the most (far more than Braid, which was fine). But it's a certain kind of game that won't appeal to everyone's play style and probably depends on your mood.

But I guess what's so cool about modern video games is that there are so many good choices for different people.