Could you please change the cursor to pointer when hovering over a dog / bunny? I initially thought I would have to solve the puzzle on a piece of paper, until a peer told me that I can just drag and drop the characters.
Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle
361–370 of 485 posts
Re: Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
She's a genius[1]. Took me an age to figure out what the rules were and then a fair while to actually get it done. [1]Well compared to me anyway
I inferred rules that turned out not to be true: 1) I thought that, obviously, rabbits and dogs couldn't occupy the same space, lest the dog attack the rabbit, causing a lose-condition 2) I assumed that only one animal could occupy a node. The game, until the last move, is winnable with those extra rules.
I didn't necessarily think of those as rules, but I nevertheless solved the puzzle (until the end) without contradicting them. I only noticed maybe halfway to the solution that there is only one carrot, so obviously the rabbits have to pile up to solve it.
Re: Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle
#363That was fun!!! Thank you!
Re: Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle
#364I'm convinced there is only one way to solve this: Write a program to unroll the constrained state transition diagram into an unconditional state transition diagram and find the shortest path. The unrolled version would still be pretty small so you can just iterate over it.
It was easy to solve in like, 2 minutes.
Re: Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found this particular puzzle pretty easy, but I have a lot of experience with puzzles (recently because my kid likes them). If you want to train novices up to solve very difficult puzzles of this style (or whatever style), start with very simple puzzles and build your way up in a sequence of steadily increasing difficulty, introducing only about one new trick at a time.
I disagree with this completely. The level of difficulty is just enough to get the brain properly churning with a manageable level of frustration without being completely impossible.
You didn’t disagree with anything I said...
I never said this isn’t a fun tricky-but-not-too-tricky one-off puzzle for out-of-practice adult puzzle solvers. (It has one key trick that someone who doesn’t do very many puzzles might take a while to figure out.) I only said it was pretty easy for me personally.
I further claimed that if you want to train complete novices (I am thinking of my 6 year old here, or his less experienced 6-year-old friends) to solve very hard variants of this puzzle, you should start with easy puzzles and introduce one new trick at a time. If your goal is not to train novices to solve hard puzzles, then feel free to disregard this advice.
There are some fun harder tricks that you can throw into this genre of puzzle (not included in this particular example) that if you tried presenting to my 6 year old would completely stump him. But after working his way up methodically he could be taught to notice and solve them.
Re: Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution is 26 steps and that should be the optimal solution.
Awesome! Thanks for popping up and clarifying. For those of us that are not experts, how is this sort of problem generally classified? I've seen others on here say classical planning, but I wasn't sure if that is correct.
I would (also) say that this is a classic planning problem. It's deterministic, observable, static, and discrete.
Re: Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
The graph drawn here is different from the graph of states: the latter has the cube of the number of these graph nodes, and several edges per node, and would be difficult to draw clearly on a flat paper.
The state I’m referring to is is the whole puzzle state. It’s a confusing term in this case.
Yes, and as I said, the number of puzzle states is the number of nodes in the pictured graph, cubed. There is some relation between the two graphs, but they aren’t the same, and the pictured graph doesn’t necessarily show too clearly how to navigate around between different regions of the graph of game states.
Re: Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle
#368Really cool game and idea. Please build more.
Re: Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle
#369Fun puzzle. Nice flashing lights as a reward
Re: Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle
#370This was great.