Last night I started level 100. The first puzzle was three flips and Shifter had not solved it before I went to bed. This morning, I restarted with a two flip puzzle. I’ll let it run all day, except…
Well, normally, a puzzle finishes fairly quickly or not at all. and for puzzles like this, even placing the first several pieces correctly, a 14×14x5 puzzle with 32 pieces is just not going to be that fast ever. Still, 2 flips and the smallest piece being three blocks is a pretty good starter. Not as good as zero flips, but I guess I’ll just keep restarting this each morning before work until I find one it can solve.
Thanks, Sensei, for the gentle reminder that I shouldn’t assume 100 would be easy just because 99 was.
9 Comments
Actually, it was supposed to be as easy as the other levels.
You may want to tinker with it to figure out why.
There are “196 choose 2″ possibilities for the location of the two flips; less than 20000.
Since your model prunes really well at “flips = 0″, you can rethink this as solving 20000 zero-flip puzzles. This should solve in less than 30 minutes.
I hope then that it’s done when I get home
Otherwise I’ll tinker with it. It’s the weekend, maybe I’ll translate it into Java and multithread.
Man, that sounds like work! But I doubt it would take long.
Or just bite the bullet and drop it into C and just take care of all the object allocation and garbage collection issues at once.
I typically solve 0-flip puzzles in 2-40 seconds. So that’s a bit more than 30 minutes.
Remember, I’m using an interpreted, very high level language. It’s a miracle it runs as fast as it does
That’s pretty high. A 0-flip puzzle should be almost trivial, regardless of language on a modern processor.
Considering the ease of reaching 0 flips in your search, improving this would greatly speed things up.
Considering how long it took the ‘C’-based Kvho solver, I don’t think it took unusually long. Maybe it was just a bad puzzle.
Congratulations on your accomplishment.
Thanks, but too tired to jig
Hello, I am a shapeshifter fanatic but unfortunately I get stuck at around level 30. If you could add me on MSN if you can and maybe help me with the future puzzles in the game? That would be cool, please reply!
I’ve moved on, there’s no reason for me to play Shapeshifter any more. Winning once is a victory, winning twice, meh. So I’m not really interested in solving other people’s puzzles either. However, if you want to discuss algorithms, well, I’d love to!