Really fun idea and a great implementation. I have been trying to come up with programming puzzles for my own project https://www.dev-esc.com - an escape room for devs
At a start up I applied to last time I was seriously looking, they asked me to implement a program to play hangman. It was a fun puzzle; certainly didn't take me 3 hours but it did eat a chunk of time. I don't object to this kind of thing, within reason. As tptacek and others caution, they shouldn't be farming out actual work, though.
I feel like a more interesting piece of code would be one that generated random (but solvable) puzzles and showed what the minimum number of moves was to solve them.
I really enjoy the types of problems on PuzzleNode[1]. My local coder meetup does one each month for code reviews. Their puzzles are just deep enough to where you need to think through how you'll design the system. They're really fun for exploring different programming techniques.
Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse game.
Did you try graphing how runtime scales as a function of puzzle size? (Assuming there are puzzles available of large sizes.) It would also be cool if your program could be used to generate new puzzles?
Hi! I created an "Escape Site". It has a score of challenging puzzles designed to make you think outside the box, and think differently about the way websites work. The success rate is about 10%. How do you fare?
I built a service that generates digital puzzles. It's like an escape room: you get a clue that leads you to another clue, and at the end of the chain you get to a prize (secret message).
It's very similar to CTFs, but less focused on security aspects.
That looks really cool, of course you can incorporate a puzzle!
I don't have data on solution times, but I think it's very different for an individually-solved series of similar puzzles and a group escape room-style puzzle. My recommendation would be to prefer a puzzle that requires an "Aha!" moment and from there is relatively quick, rather than a more meticulous one that requires tweaking parameters and messing around a lot.
Much of the inspiration for the style of challenge actually was drawn from Zachtronics! I also used to play CTFs frequently and handle the cryptography category, so that was a big push for why I wanted to try making this.
The original idea came from talking about whether we could make a puzzle around an OISC (one-instruction set computer) architecture, and after playing with it my cofounder came up with these instructions. I implemented the debugger and wrote out solutions, and amazingly it both worked _and_ presented a healthy challenge.
I do them in Elixir and I find it to be a great language for this kind of thing.
I'm not a very sophisticated Elixir programmer, but I think my solutions are decent enough (and readable, for the most part!). I have a repo which has solutions for quite a few of the puzzles, along with some nifty little mix tasks to help set up a skeleton for each day's puzzle and automatically fetch the input file.
This seems fun. I'd be interested to hear how people who have never programmed before react to, and cope with the 'puzzle'. I didn't find any information beside the game itself.
Any chance you'd write a technical article on your algorithms? I'm in love with puzzle manipulation code. Seeing the sort of things you're doing would be a lot of fun.
Took me a while to figure it out as I assumed the labels on the lines to be dynamic.
But once I got it, it was super fun to play. I wonder if you can algorithmically generate these puzzles and have human's curate them based on factors (joy, difficulty, visual appeal etc).
Neat game. I was bored so I wrote a little brute-force solver in my toy language. Takes almost a minute to solve today's puzzle though: http://paste.pr0.tips/hgs
My own “Show HN” is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28579191
andersource would you be willing to consider letting me incorporate something like a checkerboard puzzle?
Have you any metrics on average completion times etc? Striking the right balance between fun vs difficult has proved tricky for me.
reply