3 ms·

That's also fun up to some point. Whenever I optimized for fewest cycles in Codex it usually turned out to be "work with as many atoms per cycle as you possibly

That's also fun up to some point. Whenever I optimized for fewest cycles in Codex it usually turned out to be "work with as many atoms per cycle as you possibly can", or something silly like building a solution on one side and mirroring the solution on the other side to get less cycles. The tedium of adding more and more tends to make least-cycle solutions less rewarding to craft, at least for me. (It's still fun though!) If you open up a least-symbol solution for Codex you'll find a lot of interesting tricks used to reduce symbols. For example, grab-left-left-release-left-left can be accomplished with just grab-left-release-wait, if you sync it so the released atom is removed by another arm at exactly the right time. It's a nice feeling to successfully shave off even one more symbol using these hacks!

thaumasiotes 7y ago
If Robot Odyssey really is open-ended, that would solve my problem with the Zachtronics games, which is that they aren't. SpaceChem gives you interesting goals and makes you fit your instructions inside a square. It's sort of like programming, except you have to do it in Befunge on a 4x4 (!) canvas. Or later... TWO 4x4 or 5x5 canvases. So I get frustrated that rather than the difficulty being in the programming, where I wanted it, it's in designing the spatial layout of the programming. In Opus Magnum, there are a lot of interesting things you can do to get more parallelism going in your solution. Except that, again, "fake" difficulty is added in the form of restricted inputs. Maybe I could build the molecule faster with two sources of water, but I only have one, and one source can't produce more than one particle per two cycles. The parts with costs are unlimited -- they just count against your cost. Source and sink parts are "free", but limited in bizarre ways. So much for the parallel approach I wanted to try. :/

thaumasiotes 7y ago

If Robot Odyssey really is open-ended, that would solve my problem with the Zachtronics games, which is that they aren't. SpaceChem gives you interesting goals and makes you fit your instructions inside a square. It's sort of like programming, except you have to do it in Befunge on a 4x4 (!) canvas. Or later... TWO 4x4 or 5x5 canvases. So I get frustrated that rather than the difficulty being in the programming, where I wanted it, it's in designing the spatial layout of the programming. In Opus Magnum, there are a lot of interesting things you can do to get more parallelism going in your solution. Except that, again, "fake" difficulty is added in the form of restricted inputs. Maybe I could build the molecule faster with two sources of water, but I only have one, and one source can't produce more than one particle per two cycles. The parts with costs are unlimited -- they just count against your cost. Source and sink parts are "free", but limited in bizarre ways. So much for the parallel approach I wanted to try. :/