Month: February 2015

Building Puzzles is the Hardest Puzzle

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I picked up Hexcells recently on the basis of Kodra and Rae's talking it up, and have enjoyed it quite a bit. I've always been a big fan of logic puzzles of any sort, so it was right up my alley.  The basic gameplay is much like Minesweeper, where each cell is either part of a pattern (blue) or not (black). Yellow cells are of unknown status and must be marked by you. To solve the puzzle you must successfully mark all of the cells. Unlike Minesweeper, however, each puzzle gives you some information to start with and can be solved with no guessing at all.

As you graduate to more and more complex puzzles, additional methods of providing information to you are introduced. You'll be told how many blue cells are in a particular line of cells, or that all the blue cells in a particular line or around a cell are contiguous. Eventually you start getting cells that contain a number signifying the number of blue cells within two spaces of that cell. Ultimately you find yourself having to combine information from multiple sources to identify cells properly. It's very difficult by the end, but extremely gratifying when you successfully solve a puzzle.

There are 3 Hexcells games, each with 36 puzzles of increasing difficulty. The difficult also increases more quickly in each successive game, so you're quickly solving puzzles harder than the previous games hardest.  By the end they're downright fiendish and I found myself having to take a break and come back with fresh eyes on multiple occasions (thankfully the 3rd game saves your progress on partially completed puzzles).  Ultimately though, I made it through and finished the final puzzle.

My wife saw me playing and asked "Are you a bee?"

The third game, Hexcells Infinite, introduces Infinite Mode, which boasts 100,000,000 computer generated puzzles.  Put in a numerical seed, get a puzzle.  Sadly, but not at all surprisingly, they're just not as good as the set puzzles you get up to that point.  The game's main puzzles contain a paucity of information, forcing you to determine which of a very few existing clues your latest moves will combine with to identify your next move.  The generated puzzles I've tried, on the other hand, are overrun with numbers from the very beginning and are mostly a matter of scanning through the puzzle for the next obvious move.  Occasionally I'll have to stop and think a bit, but it's mostly just click click click done.

The problem is that programming a computer to build interesting puzzles is difficult.  Much more difficult than writing a program to solve puzzles; that's generally trivial if the puzzle is based on pure logic and intended to be human-solvable.  Building a puzzle requires you to develop explanations for what make a puzzle good that can be expressed in code.  I have no way of knowing how the Hexcells puzzle generator works, but if I had to guess I'd posit that it generates the field of hexes and assigns them each blue or black based on an algorithm that uses the seed as input, creates all the possible clues the puzzle could have, then starts hiding cells and removing clues while checking that the puzzle remains solvable.

With a million possible puzzles, I'd guess that from sheer happenstance some clever ones will show up, but Sturgeon's Law appears to apply in this case.  That said, it's still a great game and would have been well worth my time if the Infinite feature didn't exist at all.

Building Puzzles is the Hardest Puzzle

by
I picked up Hexcells recently on the basis of Kodra and Rae‘s talking it up, and have enjoyed it quite a bit. I’ve always been a big fan of logic puzzles of any sort, so it was right up my alley. The basic gameplay is much like Minesweeper, where each cell is either part of a pattern (blue) or not (black). Yellow cells are of unknown status and must be marked by you. To solve the puzzle you must successfully mark all of the cells. Unlike Minesweeper, however, each puzzle gives you some information to start with and can be solved with no guessing at all.

As you graduate to more and more complex puzzles, additional methods of providing information to you are introduced. You’ll be told how many blue cells are in a particular line of cells, or that all the blue cells in a particular line or around a cell are contiguous. Eventually you start getting cells that contain a number signifying the number of blue cells within two spaces of that cell. Ultimately you find yourself having to combine information from multiple sources to identify cells properly. It’s very difficult by the end, but extremely gratifying when you successfully solve a puzzle.

There are 3 Hexcells games, each with 36 puzzles of increasing difficulty. The difficult also increases more quickly in each successive game, so you’re quickly solving puzzles harder than the previous games hardest. By the end they’re downright fiendish and I found myself having to take a break and come back with fresh eyes on multiple occasions (thankfully the 3rd game saves your progress on partially completed puzzles). Ultimately though, I made it through and finished the final puzzle.

My wife saw me playing and asked “Are you a bee?”

The third game, Hexcells Infinite, introduces Infinite Mode, which boasts 100,000,000 computer generated puzzles. Put in a numerical seed, get a puzzle. Sadly, but not at all surprisingly, they’re just not as good as the set puzzles you get up to that point. The game’s main puzzles contain a paucity of information, forcing you to determine which of a very few existing clues your latest moves will combine with to identify your next move. The generated puzzles I’ve tried, on the other hand, are overrun with numbers from the very beginning and are mostly a matter of scanning through the puzzle for the next obvious move. Occasionally I’ll have to stop and think a bit, but it’s mostly just click click click done.

The problem is that programming a computer to build interesting puzzles is difficult. Much more difficult than writing a program to solve puzzles; that’s generally trivial if the puzzle is based on pure logic and intended to be human-solvable. Building a puzzle requires you to develop explanations for what make a puzzle good that can be expressed in code. I have no way of knowing how the Hexcells puzzle generator works, but if I had to guess I’d posit that it generates the field of hexes and assigns them each blue or black based on an algorithm that uses the seed as input, creates all the possible clues the puzzle could have, then starts hiding cells and removing clues while checking that the puzzle remains solvable.

With a million possible puzzles, I’d guess that from sheer happenstance some clever ones will show up, but Sturgeon’s Law appears to apply in this case. That said, it’s still a great game and would have been well worth my time if the Infinite feature didn’t exist at all.

Elite: Dangerous and The Game I Want To Play

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I recently loaded up Elite: Dangerous and have heavily backed Star Citizen. It’s been an interesting ride on E:D, and it makes me think of the game I really want to play.

I love Firefly. I love Star Wars. I badly, badly want a game that lets me play out the fantasy of cruising through the stars with my friends, getting into fights and blasting our way out of them. I want to be navigating an asteroid field while Bel and Kodra fight off a boarding party, Rae is keeping my ship running, and Ash is shooting down fighters who are chasing us. I want to be the aerial support while my friends go treasure hunting on a hostile planet, chased by bounty hunters. I want to fly under a catwalk and catch my team as they flee an overwhelmingly powerful boss.

Elite: Dangerous gives me the flight part of this. I really enjoy the flying, and the space combat is really enjoyable. I also grew up with flight sims, so I’m familiar with flight controls. I want to play it with my friends, but I want something for them to do while I’m flying the ship that’s just as interesting.

The closest I’ve been able to come to this sort of experience is games like Battlefield or certain Halo maps, where you can be the pilot for a vehicle and race for mission objectives. I want that experience in a co-op PvE game.

One thing that I think MMOs have missed the boat on (so to speak) is the idea of travel as a skill, like combat. Getting from point A to point B is rarely interesting or exciting. At best it’s uneventful, and at worst you’re actively annoyed because something attacked you on your way to somewhere. I’d love to see an MMO with a suite of travel skills, allowing you to get from place to place in various ways and making the travel itself an adventure. Having travel be an adventure unto itself is one of the really big advantages of a persistent world, and a great way to meet new people and be glad there are other players in this giant game you’re in, and I think we’ve lost sight of that.

Long story short: starship pilot, LFG.

Source: Digital Initiative
Elite: Dangerous and The Game I Want To Play

AggroChat #43 – Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

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Join Bel, Ash, Rae and Tam in another cavalcade of wonder, known as the AggroChat podcast.  This evening we are missing the illustrious Kodra…  who was simply too sick to record but will hopefully join us again next week.  We start our evening with my mind getting absolutely blown seconds before we start recording.  Tam provides a link to the strangest hobby I have seen..  a man who cooks doll sized food.  So we take a brief intermission from the normal proceedings to talk about this strange spectacle.  Once we get under way we talk Final Fantasy XIV and defeating turn 6 of Binding Coil, and our efforts working in Turn 7.  From here we meander into a disucssion of random elements in raid encounters, comparing and contrasting World of Warcraft Blackrock Foundry to the FFXIV encounters.

From here we meander into a long session talking about Elite Dangerous.  We talk about our pie in the sky ultimate space game, and how maybe we aren’t that far away from it.  Finally Rae, Tam and Ash talk about their experiences watching the League of Legends NALCS and how that experience has changed now that they are also competing in a Fantasy League.  We recorded considerably later than normal, so I think towards the end of the show we were all getting a bit drowsy and maybe a tad bit slap happy.

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