3 ms·
ThinkFun, the US publishers of Rush Hour, wrote a blog post about this when they made the mobile app with a bunch of autogenerated levels maybe around 2010. Unf
by jsnell 8y ago
ThinkFun, the US publishers of Rush Hour, wrote a blog post about this when they made the mobile app with a bunch of autogenerated levels maybe around 2010. Unfortunately that article is basically impossible to find now, since they redid their website and deleted the old posts. (I say "impossible", since I spent a couple of hours looking for it again while reading papers on procedural puzzle generation last year. Maybe somebody here has better luck).
The basic metric their level generator used for quantifying interesting difficulty was the earliest point of non-trivial divergence in solutions. I.e. if there's a puzzle with a 50 and 51 move solution, having those solutions diverge on move 3 is interesting. Having them diverge on move 45 isn't.
- hcs 8y agoI wonder if this is the article you're thinking of: https://web.archive.org/web/20100221131225/http://www.thinkfun.com:80/rushhour/insidestory.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20100221131225/http://www.thinkf... (The text of the article is only visible at the very bottom of the page for some reason)
- fogleman 8y agoAwesome find, thanks! Wonder if I can find this Mark Engelberg fellow...
- hcs 8y agoHe also made an original game with ThinkFun: Code Master, which does some fun stuff with state machines: https://www.thinkfun.com/products/code-master/ https://www.thinkfun.com/products/code-master/
- jsnell 8y agoThat's it, thanks! (And to romellem for the link with a working layout and images.)
- romellem 8y agoThrough hcs's reply below, I was able to come across a better link to the original blog post: Thinkfun & Mark Engelberg, "The Inside Story of How We Created 2500 Great Rush Hour Challenges" https://web.archive.org/web/20130703141244/http://www.thinkfun.com/microsite/rushhour/creating2500challenges https://web.archive.org/web/20130703141244/http://www.thinkf...