Live data from Hacker News

Game about squares

gameaboutsquares.com

51–60 of 208 posts

Re: Game about squares

#55
post #46
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is! Try stacking the red and dark blue colors up in order and pushing them with the light blue block. I got stuck on 21, and that's enough for me for now. Good puzzle game!

21: 'think outside of the box' :P

Hah, nice tip. I was stuck on that one too...

Re: Game about squares

#56

It should be possible to write a solver for this with a "decision tree". There are decisions where the blocks run out of the screen - you ignore these. You only take into account "sensible" decisions (this has to be formalized). When there are multiple possible "sensible" decisions you branch. One decision consists of an action "click x times on block X and y times on block Y …"

Any solution is on the form 12232322... where the number expresses what square to click. It's pretty easy to brute force the game from there. Sure, you can use tree search and prune the search a bit, but it's still brute force and may take exponential time for tough levels. You can also look into some of the research that has been done on Sokoban AI's.

There's no need to search all move sequences, because so many of them end up in the same game state (a game state is a combination of positions and orientations of arrows, with a cut off on positions because far away ones because don't affect whether there's a solution or not).

Of the levels I saw (up to 31), the relevant board area was never more than 20x20 and there were never more than 4 arrows. So the state space had size 16(2020 choose 4) ~= 17 billion. Of course most of those states won't be reachable from the starting state... so the actual number of states you need to explore is probably more like a million or even a thousand.

I think a program could solve all of the game's puzzles in under a second.

Re: Game about squares

#57

And go! Tomorrow this game in full will appear on the Google Play store with the exact same colors. In 3 days this game will be rewritten in Swift, Erlang, and have a community based variation. In 4 days someone will find a way to merge this game with 2048 and Flappy Bird. In a week there will be 20 variations of this game including one called Dodge Squares on the iTunes App Store. I'm not psychic, I've just seen thi…

You forgot to mention the various AI solvers that will sprung up and compete to be smartest / fastest.

And then blogposts and news articles written about the phenomena on marketing journals, Buzzfeed, newssites...
Post reply on HN