Dangerous game

Go ahead. Play this game and see if I care. It’s your own damn fault if you waste an hour staring at the screen and clicking like a drooling gameboy lab-monkey.

Here, I’ll make it easy for you.
Click here. Nobody’s peeking.

(This is a seductive logic game I found on Jesse Ruderman’s site. It was written by Pavils from Latvia, who I’m sure is a very nice young man. He’s certainly clever with the Flash.)

7 thoughts on “Dangerous game”

  1. This actually doesn’t have anything to do with the game. I’ve stumbled upon another blog entirely devoted to newspaper funnies, which somewhat relates back to you talking about the Family Circus months ago.

    http://www.joshreads.com/

  2. I’m resisting trying this (I have way too much work to do), but a guy who just sent me another game link also rec’d this one. I’ll succumb eventually and become a drooling drone. (If these things ever get ported to the Palm pilot, I’ll never do any work again.)

  3. Some comments on this game:

    I work from “outside in”, i.e. from the little light thingies backwards towards the source. It’s a classic propagation-of-constraints problem that takes me back to problem sets and some exams in my undergrad AI class!

    I noticed pretty much right away that the connectivity graph is efficient in the sense that no wires are left dangling off into space. It took me a little while longer to realize that it’s efficient in another sense — it’s a “singly connected component”, or in other words there is exactly one path from any light back to the source without retracing. The first observation (no wires dangle into space) makes it easy to do things like rotate a straight-line block so that it’s parallel to the wall next to it, or to turn a right-angle block into the right spot when two of its adjacent blocks are already fixed in places such that they don’t connect to the right-angle block in question. The second observation comes in handy a handful of times during play when you can’t just immediately figure out where blocks go by application of the first efficiency criterion.

    I think the ‘hard walls’ version is pretty much only valuable as a speed check. For a lot of the problems, you can pretty much go all the way around the border, banging the blocks into place right away (or in a big first pass and a very small second pass to sort out some stuff that you couldn’t just immediately figure out). Then you have enough constraints to work your way in pretty quickly.

    The ‘wrapping’ version, of course, requires more use of the second efficiency principle. I usually fix the lights that I can fix right away, and then go fix some wires that are near walls (straight lines or T-bars next to walls, etc.). Then maybe I can fix a few other patterns I’ve recognized .. for example if you have two lights separated by a single block containing a straight bar, obviously the straight bar cannot connect the two lights (by applying the first efficiency principle and the fact that you can’t leave lights ‘islanded’), so the straight bar must go perpendicular to the axis connecting the two lights.

    I think I’ve learned pretty much the optimal technique here and further progress would simply depend on improving my mechanical speed and getting a better eye for when a clump of lights and wires is close to being an island (I want to say something like “when I’ve put the board into ‘atari’, but that’s reaching a little.)

    –JMike

  5. The one thing that helped me beat Hapland was that you have to move the spear as the stick man is shot up to it, allowing him to not die. Once you do that, it gets easier.

  6. That game wasn’t the dangerous one. It was the one (via Lynn) that is the dangerous one. Head Pigeon and I are both sitting her trying to figure that one out.

  7. Hooray! I finally solved the puzzle. I needed two big clues. One from Ben above (thanks Ben!) and one from Summer Blues about getting the timing right on the weird motorcycle guy. Now I can sleep in peace. Just don’t show me anymore of these things.

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