Live data from Hacker News

enclose.horse

enclose.horse

51–60 of 242 posts

Re: enclose.horse

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine. So these kind of games aren't for you, then. Remember crosswords in newspapers? Yeah, think of it like that. You don't get hooked until you cannot let go, you get a limited chunk served each day. Same with Wordle.

I remember buying a magazine full of crosswords and similar puzzles when I was in the mood. And when there were sites with unlimited Wordle, I played a few in a row. On the internet, unlike with newspapers, you're not limited to how many levels/games you can make per day. Making it once per day doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's condescending to the users and feels like a power trip.

> It's condescending to the users and feels like a power trip.

condescending (adjective): having or showing an attitude of patronizing superiority.

I don't really see how a once-a-day puzzle is condescending, unless it's a "You can't be trusted to regulate yourself so I'll do it for you" type thing. Adding a dictionary definition like above, however, probably is condescending :)

But I like the one-a-day format because, as other comments have said, you can spend an entire day with just one puzzle feeling important (relative to things that are important).

Re: enclose.horse

#52

Great game, I love it! I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics. They would be useful if they ever want to bundle 100 levels in order of difficulty and release this as a Steam game (which I would absolutely buy!) I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the ce…

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air.

I think it should go up, otherwise it doesn't look like a wall. It would look like something the horse can step on and run over. For the water it makes sense to be flat flat and that the horse doesn't want to touch it: it is water-shy.

Re: enclose.horse

#53

I am curious on how you would algorithmically find the optimal solution for this kind of problem for much bigger grids. I wanted to do some seed finding in Factorio for the same exact problem using the generated map images, but never found a good solution that was fast enough.

> algorithmically find the optimal solution for this kind of problem for much bigger grids.

Great, now I've been double nerd-sniped - once for the thing itself and another for 'What would an optimiser for this look like? Graph cuts? SAT/SMT? [AC]SP?'

Re: enclose.horse

#56
Nice game! Out of curiosity, are the daily levels built by hand or algorithmically? Is there some way to measure their difficulty computationally, other than just trying to do it yourself or seeing how many people get a perfect score? I'm also working on a grid-based browser game and both those questions have come up for me, I'm keen to see how other people tackle it.

Re: enclose.horse

#58

I am curious on how you would algorithmically find the optimal solution for this kind of problem for much bigger grids. I wanted to do some seed finding in Factorio for the same exact problem using the generated map images, but never found a good solution that was fast enough.

> algorithmically find the optimal solution for this kind of problem for much bigger grids. Great, now I've been double nerd-sniped - once for the thing itself and another for 'What would an optimiser for this look like? Graph cuts? SAT/SMT? [AC]SP?'

I'd bet it's NP-hard. The standard reduction to a flow problem only tells you if a cut exists (by min-cut max-flow duality), but here we want the cut of size at most N that maximizes enclosed area.

The Leetcode version of this is "find articulation points", which is just a DFS, but it's less general than what is presented here.

Re: enclose.horse

#59

I am curious on how you would algorithmically find the optimal solution for this kind of problem for much bigger grids. I wanted to do some seed finding in Factorio for the same exact problem using the generated map images, but never found a good solution that was fast enough.

The site uses Answer Set Programming with the Clingo engine to compute the optimal solutions for smaller grids. Maximizing grids like this is probably NP-hard. Note that traditional SAT and SMT solvers are quite inefficient at computing flood-fills. The ASP specifications it uses to compute optimal solutions are surprisingly short and readable, and look like: #const budget=11. horse(4,4). cell(0,0). boundary(0,0). ce…

Nice, you don't see clingo mentioned often. We use it in the Spack package manager for resolving dependencies [1]

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/blob/develop/lib/spack/spack/...

Re: enclose.horse

#60

Cool game, but I don't like how you get only one chance. Even returning to the page, you can't try again to beat your previous score. No replayability value at all.

It shows you what the exit routes are, what your score will be, and you can move the gates around as long as you want, so the means of finding the maximum area are entirely within your grasp.

But you have no idea what the optimal solution is, are you 1,10,50 away from it. Would be nice to have some indicator of how close you are before you submit, though I guess that's intentional.
Post reply on HN