[HN Gopher] TIS-100: Tessellated Intelligence System
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TIS-100: Tessellated Intelligence System
Author : cglong
Score : 205 points
Date : 2024-04-25 06:09 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zachtronics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zachtronics.com)
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Underrated game that is the most fun I've ever had doing
| assembly.
| anta40 wrote:
| As a software developer who occasionally having fun with assembly
| coding, I think this Shenzen/IO are the finest coding games by
| Zachtronics (and probably in general, ever).
|
| I'd love an updated/improved version of CoreWar, but probably
| it's too geeky for most people. Oh well...
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| Corewar is fun. Someone should include it as an optional
| feature in a cyberpunk game. So to crack open electronic locks
| you need to fight computer warriors.
| dijit wrote:
| I was (and, am) a huge fan of EXAPunks, the limitation being my
| own problem solving skills.
|
| Do you think TIS-100 is better or worse? It's a strange
| omission from your list.
|
| Is it that you never played it, or do you think TIS-100 is
| superior (asking because I haven't tried TIS-100)
| eterm wrote:
| I'm not the OP but have similar tastes.
|
| Exapunks just never clicked for me in the way that the other
| Zach games did. Perhaps it was too visual, or perhaps the
| problems didn't sit well with how I problem solve.
|
| I don't like to look at guides, yet it took me a long time to
| hit a wall in TIS-100 . But the wall I did hit was "Signal
| Window Filter" which involved delayed state.
|
| A lot of the exapunk problems felt much closer to that style
| of problem, so perhaps it's just a blindspot of my own
| reasoning.
| kibwen wrote:
| Zachtronics is a contender for the greatest game studio you've
| never heard of.
|
| If you're a fan of Factorio, you owe it to yourself to play
| SpaceChem, TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O, Opus Magnum, Exapunks, and Last
| Call BBS.
|
| (In fact, since Factorio was inspired by a Minecraft mod, and
| since Zachtronics' Infiniminer was the direct inspiration for
| Minecraft, there's no Factorio without Zachtronics!)
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| Turing complete is also fun and challenging.
| lencastre wrote:
| But the aesthetics are completely different and in a way
| different game mechanics. Both computer puzzles. No doubt TC
| is literally the representation of a computer as the goal of
| the main storyline.
| Avshalom wrote:
| Have you played kobctpyktop?
|
| http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/koh
| c...
| y1n0 wrote:
| SpaceChem is ok, I didn't really like Shenzhen IO. Exapunks is
| pretty fun, but Opus Magnum is my favorite by a large margin.
| dcre wrote:
| Try Infinifactory if you haven't!
| forty wrote:
| I liked nearly every games by zachtronics (I even enjoyed
| Ironclads tactics which I don't think was as popular as
| some others) but not infinyfactory. I couldn't find the
| added value of 3d in a puzzle game.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| Your preferences are the exact reverse of mine!
| romwell wrote:
| >HackerNews
|
| >Zachtronics
|
| >Never heard of
|
| Pick two.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| HackerNews and Never heard of.
| blowski wrote:
| I had never heard of Zachtronics, and I've been on Hacker
| News since 2012.
| pipe2devnull wrote:
| I too have never heard of Zachtronics and I used to play lots
| of video games
| Terr_ wrote:
| I think the best introductory recommendation would be the
| missing item: Infinifactory.
|
| It may not be as nakedly algorithmic as some of the others, but
| the visual impact of a solution is very satisfying--you might
| even be able to show it of to family members without their eyes
| totally glazing over. :p
| hcs wrote:
| I tend to recommend Opus Magnum as an introduction, it's a
| lot easier to plan with, nice to look at, and has a somewhat
| more engaging story than most.
|
| I'm a big fan of all of the puzzle ones, though. SpaceChem
| had a huge impact on me, my most-viewed YouTube video is this
| one little clip from January 2, https://youtu.be/dlJmKqi6EEc
| . But very hard to explain why it occupied my whole soul for
| a week!
| bhaney wrote:
| I tend to recommend that people ignore any recommendation
| to start with a specific Zachtronics game (unless they're
| getting the recommendation from someone who knows them
| personally). Different flavors of nerds seem to have vastly
| different preferences for the games, so it's probably much
| better to take a few minutes and check how interesting the
| core mechanic of each one is to you and pick based on that.
|
| Personally I enjoy working with electronics and assembly,
| and that translated to me really liking TIS-100 and
| Shenzhen I/O. Meanwhile Opus Magnum wasn't anywhere near as
| interesting to me and felt like kind of a slog.
| haunter wrote:
| > Never heard of
|
| We are on HN
| frontalier wrote:
| > We are on HN
|
| xkcd lucky ten thousand
| sqeaky wrote:
| > a contender for the greatest game studio you've never
| heard of.
|
| If getting 1 in 10,0000 right makes you a contender.
| forty wrote:
| Yes! Spacechem is my favorite game ever, I finished the game a
| few times on tablet version (which has a few less puzzles than
| the desktop one if I remember correctly). Their other puzzle
| games are great too, but there is some minimalism and the
| simple tablet compatible UI (unlike say TIS100 which is
| minimalist in a way, but the interface is not as great -
| Spacechem can be played by kids easily) which for me makes it
| superior to the others.
| pdpi wrote:
| Another couple of games in the same vein are Human Resource
| Machine and its "sequel" Seven Billion Humans (by roughly the
| same people who gave us World of Goo many years ago).
| darzu wrote:
| I've tried many but never gotten into any Zachtronics games for
| one simple reason: they are all puzzle games.
|
| For me the motivation just never materializes. Contrast this to
| 100s of hours w/ each of Factorio, Satsifactory, and DSP
| amongst others.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| I still have strong memories of spending hours planning and
| iterating on the distributed sorting alg challenge.
| nickloewen wrote:
| TIS-100 is great. The "mesh of many tiny cores" architecture is
| cool, and also somewhat mind-bending -- but the simplicity of the
| TIS design makes it just about possible to get your head around
| it.
|
| After playing TIS a bit I found it really interesting to read
| about the Transputers and the Connection Machines, two similar
| real-world architectures.
|
| David Ackley's T2 Tile project[0] and Movable Feast Machine[1]
| look similar to me too, but they take the idea much further; the
| aim is to create an infinitely scalable and totally decentralized
| architecture. I only know a little about it, but it's super cool
| stuff.
|
| [0] https://t2tile.com/ [1] https://movablefeastmachine.org/
| vidarh wrote:
| If you liked Transputers, you might want to also read about
| Adapteva and their Epiphany core for a more recent attempt at
| something similar-ish.
|
| I still have two of their prototype machines from their
| Kickstarter - two ARM cores to run Linux, with an Epiphany chip
| with 16 cores in a 4x4 grid. But their goal was scaling it up
| to 64 cores or up to I think 4K cores on a board. Each core had
| a small amount of on core RAM and four buses to each side in
| the grid, and you could access the memory of every other core
| with a predictable latency (one cycle per "hop"), so if you
| planned things carefully, you could have them working in
| lockstep.
|
| It's an interesting space, but hard because the first difficult
| question you need to answer - which strips away a whole lot of
| potential use-cases and many of the most profitable one - is
| "why not a GPU?".
| yvdriess wrote:
| Just before Epiphany, there was also the Tilera, which had a
| lot in common with the Transputer. Our lab got one and we
| played around with it, but it was a pain to program.
| Transputer had OCCAM, Tilera chased after the C model and
| shared coherent memory. The Tilera TILE architecture lives on
| in NVIDIA's DPU.
| Tepix wrote:
| TIS-100 is great, i just wish it wouldn't use 100% CPU on Mac all
| the time.
| dahart wrote:
| It does the same on Windows, if TIS is running, my fans are on
| full blast. Good thing it's fun!
| lencastre wrote:
| Yeah,... are you running the steam version? Pun not intended!
| dahart wrote:
| Hehe. Yep. Is that the issue? Does a standalone version run
| less hot?
| hifikuno wrote:
| One thing I enjoyed about TIS-100 was trying to get the low
| cycles or low instruction count. I remember the "Aha!" moment
| when I discovered that it often not possible to get both at the
| same time.
|
| I still haven't finished all the levels, I should really finish
| it one day.
| lencastre wrote:
| Opus Magnum is a good entry point. If not that then Last BBS. I
| know most his games but only dedicated myself to these two. I'm
| trying to "finish" the main stories and then move to TIS100 or
| Shenzen
| lbj wrote:
| I had a lot of fun with this, can recommend!
| shotnothing wrote:
| after work as an embedded systems engineer, I play a game where I
| am an embedded systems engineer
|
| 10/10 asm is life
| strangecasts wrote:
| "You will go on the busman's holiday and you _will_ enjoy it ",
| the Zachtronics promise
| DaveGargan wrote:
| At one stage we seriously considered ditching programming
| questions in our interview process and instead have candidates
| play 2 levels of TIS-100
| wsc981 wrote:
| Actually this seems to me like a great idea. Why didn't you go
| through with it?
| sqeaky wrote:
| Would them sharing their steam page with all the badges showing
| they are in the top 1% of most the solutions kind of similar to
| sharing their GitHub profile?
| themoonisachees wrote:
| If you're here, you enjoy zachtronics games. We talk a lot about
| their programming games, but also check out Eliza, the visual
| Novel they made. It's great.
| johnobrien1010 wrote:
| (2015)
| some_random wrote:
| Yeah unfortunately the graphics really don't hold up in 2024 /s
| bayindirh wrote:
| TIS-100 is a great teaching tool for multi-core programming which
| pretends to be a game at the same time.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Looks cool, but coding games never appealed to me. There are
| plenty of real coding things I could do to scratch that itch.
| Abekkus wrote:
| This is exactly how I feel about factorio and _any_ games that
| involved.
| hcs wrote:
| I feel the same about Factorio, but I love the Zachtronics
| puzzles. I think it's because each problem is self-contained,
| so the active scope is generally what can fit in my head at
| once. Otherwise I need to plan things out and it starts being
| work.
| wishfish wrote:
| I've finished Exapunks. Should go back and finish TIS-100.
|
| One thing I both love & hate about Zachtronics is the Histogram
| of Doom that appears at the end of each problem. There's no
| better feeling than ending up in the top ranks for efficiency or
| speed. And no worse feeling than refactoring everything and still
| not budging from the middle of the pack.
|
| Considering you're being ranked against other players, in some
| ways this makes a Zachtronics game one of the more vicious
| multiplayer games. I mean, you're never playing against another
| player directly. But you're always being compared to others and
| it can be humbling at times.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| One of the other problems is that people can look up and submit
| worked solutions which skews the results.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| (psychological) survival of the fittest (at getting
| themselves out the social comparison pain box)
| sqeaky wrote:
| I wonder how hard of a problem detecting this would be, with
| the goal of unskewing the scores?
|
| Could they simply hash your solution and see if you match
| someone else exactly? What if you give someone credit for
| exact matches because they don't have exact matches on other
| problems and sometimes it's just more likely? What are some
| other ways this could be evaluated?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| It wouldn't be too hard, you'd need a model for baseline
| improvement which should be obtainable by those who do
| improve slowly and incrementally.
|
| Instead of using a probability density field on the final
| submissions I would use one based on the likelihood of a
| person getting to that point within the time they took ~
| skill * time.
|
| You could ask on submission if it's a worked solution so
| then you're only looking for false submissions, but since
| there is no prize for getting a high score there would be
| little incentive to lie. Those using worked submissions
| marked as their own for their own ego would have an unusual
| submission pattern.
|
| There are many layout options for the same algorithms and
| it's likely that a rough percentage of worked solutions
| could be obtained where a specific layout appears much more
| often than it should.
|
| Worked submissions are also much more likely to be final
| submissions.
|
| Not sure if I remember correctly, but maybe you need to
| give a solution before progressing. I would make it
| possible to progress without giving a solution to take away
| that incentive.
| imstate wrote:
| A good zach-like everyone should check out it "the signal state"
| on steam.
|
| This game is great, but is geared more towards digital logic
| instead of coding.
| some_random wrote:
| I don't have anything to add other than that TIS-100 is fantastic
| and everyone here should give it a try!
| d_tr wrote:
| Every single game of theirs is a gem in every way and I just hope
| they decide to make more.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| This game and shenzen i/o inspired me to become a software
| developer.
| theyinwhy wrote:
| Unfortunately, a closed game studio
| grogenaut wrote:
| My problem with zachtronics games like TIS-1000 is two fold:
|
| 1) just give me a real ide (my issue with pico8 as well)?
|
| 2) If I'm going to play a game that's close to doing FPGA stuff
| why not just learn to program an FPGA, that would be more useful
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