I agree Flash would’ve been better though. The java app pegs my CPU at 100%, for one thing.

If future puzzles took significantly longer to check the states of the bubbles (making brute force take far too long) and standard searching algorithms didn’t work then I suspect the majority or people would find the time taken to work out the right answer frustratingly long and requiring the app to ‘think about’ whether they’d got the correct answer whenever they changed a value would quickly frustrate and cause them to give up.

now, it’s too late. they’ve already got a foothold. they know.

BJacques gets props for referencing an obscure PKD book.

But helping them to learn … helping them to learn … seems foolhardy, no?

The event horizon will be when they work out what consciousness means to us. Then, they can beguile, fool and hypnotise us.

They have been practicing, btw, if you care to read the ROTM portion of theregister.co.uk.

Was there something about this game that made it impossible to implement in Flash?

leave it to the experts

For example F(A,B,C,D) = (A+B+C)(!A+C+D)(!B+!C+D)

Your task is to find an assignment to the variables that makes the whole statement true. To do that each of the parenthesized terms must be true. In this case A=1, D=1 is an assignment that “satisfies” all the terms. There may be others.

In the funsat game, I assume that each of the blobs in the middle is a term in the overall function. A green ball is one that is satisfied, a red ball is one where all of the variables have been assigned and it is still not true.

I wish that funsat showed the expressions so that you could have an idea which variables matter to that term. The only way to figure it out is to zoom in on one ball. Then it shows only the inputs that matter for that term.

-Jeff Bell

It’s interesting — I have an MSc in AI, and I’m actually (so far) solving it using a fairly standard AI algorithm: at each step, pick the option that appears to give you the most reward and constrains you the least. In this case, that means starting with the toggles that satisfy the most number of lights for one option and the least number of lights for the other. The reason I’ve found it boring, though, is that I’ve never once been wrong using that algorithm, so have never had to back-track and really think it through.

It reminds me of fold.it, as LennStar noted above. I really never understood fold.it, though, and just felt like I was guessing.

@johnofjack: You’re surprised? These people are obviously programmers, not design people. The easiest language to bash it out in and stick it on the web is Java. Most likely, no one in the team knows Flash, or has ever needed to. But if it starts to get some attention, it’s true that they would be advised to get a Flash person.

For the SAT, remember to do all of the smallest circles first. Thy have only one variable, and there is only on way to go. Then find all the black circles. They have only free variable left, so you don’t have to decide anything yet.