[HN Gopher] Solving puzzles faster than humanly possible
___________________________________________________________________
Solving puzzles faster than humanly possible
Author : panic
Score : 95 points
Date : 2024-06-21 21:10 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (biggieblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (biggieblog.com)
| LorenDB wrote:
| Semi-related to the title: one of my coworkers recently was
| blocked by a CAPTCHA. The reason? He solved it too fast.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Obviously, your coworker isn't human. You should keep a close
| eye on him. If he gives you an odd-looking flower to take home
| and says you'll feel much better in the morning, definitely do
| not bring that flower into your home.
| jader201 wrote:
| This is based on the game, Opus Magnum [1], where you basically
| program arms to move and combine units to generate the expected
| units.
|
| You're graded on a few thing: efficiency in number of movements,
| efficiency in number of units, and efficiency in space.
|
| Like real programming, you often have to sacrifice one or two to
| maximize the other.
|
| Definitely a game most on HN would enjoy.
|
| [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/558990/Opus_Magnum/
| stavros wrote:
| I was going to say this reminds me of Zachtronics games, but I
| looked it up and it _is_ one, so no wonder.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Am I the only person around who hates Steam? I would happily
| snap this game up except for the fact that it's on Steam. What
| benefit do I, as the person playing the game, get from having
| to run another program just to run the program I really want to
| run?
|
| I made an exception for N++, but even there I play it _much_
| less often than I otherwise would because I loathe the fact
| that I can 't just double-click the game itself and go.
|
| HA! Here was my experience just now:
|
| 1. Open N++ 2. Wait maybe 5 seconds with no visible update 3.
| Steam opens a very primitive, very non-Mac-like dialog, to
| inform me it's downloading an update to itself -- 195MB!? 4.
| Wait for that to finish 5. Another primitive dialog: updating
| Steam. Not the game -- Steam. 6. Update completes. It's been
| about a minute? since I tried to run N++ 7. Steam presents a
| "choose user" dialog. I'm the only user, WTH? 8. I choose
| myself. Steam asks me to log in. I didn't log out, it's the
| same computer, why should I have to log in again? 9. Password
| doesn't auto-suggest. 10. I don't remember my password. 11. I
| give up and hit cmd-Q 12. Steam doesn't quit 13. Check the
| menu. Quit is disabled 14. Force-quit Steam
|
| Steam, you run other programs. That's all you do. You're bad at
| your job.
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| Don't buy it on Steam then. It's available on 2 other non-
| steam outlets, Gog and Itch.io.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Thanks! N++ appears to _only_ be available through Steam
| :-(
| free_bip wrote:
| This comment is completely off the rails. Your extremely
| idealistic interpretation of "I should just run the program
| directly" is preventing you from gaining enjoyment out of
| literally the most popular gaming program in existence. And
| it's popular for a reason: It's really damn good at its job.
| All these extra steps are just a consequence of you extremely
| rarely opening it - steam is likely giving you the "first
| start" experience because it's been so long (I say this
| because nobody else is reporting issues like this online).
| I've seen it happen after certain major updates too. There's
| also an element of PEBKAC; password managers are a thing and
| make logging in take no more than a couple clicks.
| gcanyon wrote:
| 1. Other apps *ask* if they can update; Steam just does it.
| 2. Can you justify why Steam should *ever* log me out?
| 3. re: password managers -- so your answer to my complaint
| that I have to run/use a second program just to run the one
| I want... is to install a third app to make the second one
| less problematic? And: I *have* a password manager: the one
| built-in to the OS.
|
| I have over 100 applications installed; exactly one of them
| requires another program to gatekeep it. And I understand
| I'm in the minority here -- I _did_ start with, "Am I the
| only one..."
| free_bip wrote:
| My answer to your complaint of "I don't remember my
| password" is that you should be using a password manager.
| If you are using one and forgot it anyway, this is
| clearly not the fault of steam. The other 2 are easily
| googleable/chatgptable, so I'll leave that to you.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I'm saying that I use the built-in password manager in
| MacOS. I just checked, and it _has_ the password, but
| Steam apparently isn 't capable of auto-filling. So I
| looked it up, entered it, and then steam decided that
| wasn't enough and I had to confirm by email, because new
| computer. This isn't national security, it's a $20 video
| game that is twenty years old, that you used to be able
| to play for free through flash in a web browser.
|
| Steam sucks.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > This isn't national security, it's a $20 video game
| that is twenty years old, that you used to be able to
| play for free through flash in a web browser.
|
| You can still do that.
|
| https://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html
|
| https://www.kongregate.com/games/MetanetSoftware/n
| krisoft wrote:
| > This comment is completely off the rails.
|
| My experience mirrors that of gcanyon. I'm an extremely
| casual gamer. I play every few months a single-player game
| sometimes. I'm fine with that and I don't want to change
| it.
|
| Steam sucks and makes me play less my games. Why?
|
| This is how the "play game" experience worked in my
| childhood: I had the game installed. Found the icon of it
| on the desktop, or in the start menu. I clicked it. The
| game loaded and I was playing.
|
| This is how the same thing works now with Steam. I start
| steam. I need to wait while it updates itself. Then I need
| to log in. (yes I'm using a password manager, it still
| sucks) Then I need to sort out the second factor. Then the
| game updates. (Sometimes I have to do some wrangling so the
| game I actually want to play updates first, instead of
| having to wait while all the other games update). And then
| I can play.
|
| > All these extra steps are just a consequence of you
| extremely rarely opening it
|
| Okay? So I should feel less bad? It sucks. Everything else
| is excuses.
|
| Sometimes I have a few hours, and I think "hey maybe I
| could play something" then I remember how much it sucks and
| I just go and read a book. That's not a glowing endorsement
| for Steam.
|
| Steam is acting as if it is Fort Knox. I understand that I
| would need to go through all of that before I can purchase
| a new game with a stored card. But I just want to play a
| game I already have, and have it installed and it is on my
| disk. So just get out of my way and let me play.
| bee_rider wrote:
| You can save your password on Steam. You can also set
| games to not automatically update.
|
| Steam and Valve are are pretty popular, in the absolute
| wasteland that is game launchers and gaming companies.
| Steam starts up reasonably quickly, and has pretty well
| thought out functionality for things like playing with
| your friends. Valve has nice sales, and contributes stuff
| like Proton (a nice wrapper around/extension of Wine, for
| Linux support).
|
| That said, I think everyone who likes Steam/Valve should
| be able to imagine how you feel about it. Because that's
| probably how they feel about stuff like the Epic
| launcher, and all those. It really ought not be that
| mysterious, we've all got different thresholds for what
| annoys us!
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I do not have that exp with Steam as I run it at computer
| launch so it is fairly a non event. However, I feel your
| pain. My playstation and switch I have that nearly same
| exp as I do not use them much. Which means pretty much
| any time I do want to play something on them is an
| update. Sometimes a fairly large one at that! By the time
| I am done updating I have decided to do something else.
|
| These update systems only have one good use case. If you
| are pretty much connected all the time. If you rarely run
| them. You are pretty much stuck in a update stack.
|
| I even joke with my wife 'i am playing my favorte
| playstation game "updating"'.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I play several times a week, and in my experience, Steam
| updates GBs of data too frequently. Nearly every time I
| open it, it starts downloading updates, so I had to
| uninstall but a handful of games to minimize that.
|
| I like the convenience, but you need a good broadband
| connection to keep up.
| klyrs wrote:
| I do hate steam! Praise be to gog!
| gcanyon wrote:
| There's dozens of us!
| amitp wrote:
| I'm happy with Steam on Windows but hate its behavior on Mac.
| It's slow and keeps stealing focus while starting up. I
| haven't gotten the "choose user" thing though. Cmd-Q does
| quit Steam for me.
| chrisldgk wrote:
| I agree, the Steam Mac app is a lot worse than it is on
| Windows or Linux. I would suppose that's because they're
| just running it in some kind of wrapper rather than having
| any kind of native implementation, that's just an
| assumption based on how it feels to use though.
| btdmaster wrote:
| Assuming N++ does not have any more DRM enabled than Steam
| imposes on it naturally:
|
| 1. Take a look at
| https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/
|
| 2. If you'd like to be able to start the game without Steam
| using that, go through https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldber
| g_emulator/-/issues/12... which may or may not work.
|
| Otherwise, your sentiment is shared, Steam is a horrible Rube
| Goldberg machine. I've given up on it myself.
| btdmaster wrote:
| Also found this fork for MacOS:
| https://github.com/inflation/goldberg_emulator
| wheybags wrote:
| The UX of steam is bad for occasional use, but good for
| regular use. Regular users pay, occasional ones don't.
|
| >Steam opens a very primitive, very non-Mac-like dialog
|
| Macos is less than 1% of the PC gaming market. The decision
| to port to macos at all is questionable, spending extra
| effort to really "feel" like a mac native app would be crazy.
|
| Your experience is bad because you are not the target market.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I would happily snap this game up except for the fact that
| it's on Steam.
|
| Opus Magnum is also available on GOG:
| https://www.gog.com/de/game/opus_magnum
|
| EDIT: It is additionally available on itch.io:
| https://zachtronics.itch.io/opus-magnum
| Ethee wrote:
| It's comments like these that make me realize we've gone full
| circle in the convenience life cycle. Pre-steam when you
| wanted to play your game you would have to download system
| specific dependencies to ensure your game could run on your
| specific system. Most of the time these came pre-packaged
| with the installation files, but rarely you would just have
| to 'figure it out' when your game crashed upon opening. Time
| to spend hours trolling some forums to find the answer to the
| random byte string you were presented. If you are someone who
| only plays one game, then perfect, once you got that single
| install figured out you're good to go. Want to play another
| game? Time to figure it out again. Today you go to steam,
| click play, and steam just 'figures it out' in the
| background. Not to mention never having to deal with proper
| save files again because you swapped systems or the numerous
| other features that gamers have cried about for years. I'm
| not saying you should use steam if you hate it as much as you
| seem to. It's just really ironic to me that if all you're
| looking for is 'double-click the game and go' you don't want
| to use Steam. My favorite part of your comment is "Steam, you
| run other programs. That's all you do. You're bad at your
| job." because yes, all it does is run other programs, and
| that's why it's so GOOD at its job. You simply can't or don't
| want to understand what it's actually doing.
| hoseja wrote:
| I really wish there was some sort of "aggregate" score in Opus
| Magnum. The specialized solutions are typically really ugly and
| unnatural.
| panic wrote:
| You may enjoy the "sum" metric obtained by adding the three
| scores together: https://zlbb.faendir.com/categories/SUM
| password54321 wrote:
| You don't play Opus Magnum if you think that's true.
| cityzen wrote:
| Another one of their games, Shenzhen I/O, is one I think HN
| would enjoy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen_I/O
|
| The player is tasked with creating products for clients, which
| involves constructing circuits and then writing code to run
| them.[4][5] The programming language used in the game is
| similar to assembly language and the circuit elements resemble
| simplified versions of real-world electronics.[1]
|
| One of my all time favs
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Except for the simplest puzzles, you always have to sacrifice
| the others to minimize one.
|
| For example, area and cost oftentimes have very similar
| designs, except to minimize your cost you're going to be using
| a plain arm with tracks, but to minimize area you're going to
| be using an extendable arm.
|
| The extendable arm costs 40 and can oftentimes be manipulated
| to use no extra space, whereas the plain arm costs 20 but if
| you need to use tracks they're just +5 each. But if you have to
| use a track you're definitely using extra area.
|
| And cycle time is completely at odds with both area and cost.
| Using a single arm to do everything will never win on cycle
| time because a single arm can't keep up with how fast the game
| produces reagents - you need two arms for that.
| panic wrote:
| BTW, hi, I'm the one running this challenge -- let me know if you
| have any questions! So far most of the interest has been from
| within the existing Opus Magnum community, but maybe some hotshot
| AI programmer on here can show us all how it's done in October.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Ah, see, if you wanted to motivate "AI programmers" you'd need
| a million dollar prize and it would help if you proposed your
| competition as an AGI challenge.
|
| (A veiled reference to ARC-AGI with my usual cynicism).
|
| Edit: to make this comment a bit more substantial it looks to
| me like Opus Magnum is a game where the player must design a
| custom solver for a puzzle, so it makes sense that there would
| be "bots" automating the process (where basically writing a bot
| replaces the game interface with a programming language). The
| challenge would be in designing a bot that can solve entire
| classes of Opus Magnum puzzles, maybe even the entire class. In
| modern AI everything has been done by learning so an "AI
| programmer" would typically try to machine-learn such a general
| solver. Unfortunately that is an open problem for modern AI,
| how to learn general solvers for entire classes of problems.
|
| On the other hand, I note that the competition is based on what
| I understand are procedurally generated puzzles. Now, a program
| that can generate puzzles should also be able to solve puzzles
| (in the same way that an automaton that can recognise a string
| can generate it). Learning to identify a generator from example
| of its output is an open problem in AI. Learning to identify a
| _solver_ from examples of its output when run as a generator
| is, well, even more open.
|
| Anyway all this is too much like work for me to be a fun
| challenge.
| pvillano wrote:
| It would be interesting to see the Pareto front for Cost,
| Cycles and Area for individual puzzles. A badge for Pareto
| optimality would give everyone a chance of being a winner in
| some small way.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| The experts do in fact track the entire Pareto Frontier in
| this way: https://biggieblog.com/tracking-the-global-opus-
| magnum-recor...
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| Decades ago, I took the test for Mensa in front of an
| administrator who was a psychologist and gave me a "real IQ
| test". At one point, he took a jigsaw puzzle composed of eight to
| ten pieces and dropped it in front of me. I was to put the puzzle
| together as quickly as possible.
|
| I immediately recognized the puzzle as an elephant and quickly
| pieced them together.
|
| "Good!" he said. "I'll mark that as almost perfect."
|
| "Almost perfect?" I exclaimed.
|
| "Come on. You're not God, " he replied.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It is kind of like a tradition in France to not give perfect
| scores (20/20) to tests, especially in humanities. The idea is
| that there is no such thing as a perfect essay, and so, no
| perfect score.
|
| Perfect scores are much more common in hard science and maths,
| where it is usually a simple matter of answering correctly to
| every question, but some teachers are still hesitant and may
| find some tiny imperfection to justify a "19/20".
|
| I think it is becoming a thing of the past as perfect scores
| are becoming more common, but it was a time where getting a
| perfect 20/20 in philosophy for the baccalaureat was literally
| newsworthy, as in, it gets talked about on national news.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-24 23:01 UTC)