For any of you other math geeks out there, here’s a fun “game”: http://www.planarity.net. I’ve made it to level seven, where it gets pretty hairy. I skipped to level 30 (because the changelog told me not to; actually, I guess I’m okay, since it says not to skip to anything over 30), and although it looked hopelessly impossible, it looked neat, sort of web-like.
What the heck’s the name of the sequence that’s used to determine the number of vertices? Level 1 has 6, level 2 has 10, level 3 has 15, etc. 0,1,2,3,6,10,15,21,28,etc. I guess level 31 would be the 35th number in the sequence.
I dunno, I’m in no way a math geek (in fact, under normal circumstances, I hate maths!) and I found it pretty fun. Got up to level 7 also, before it got a little too much for me (too tired to go on :p). I’m sure there’s a better way of doing it than trial-and-error (as I am working at the moment) but trial and error seems to have worked so far
I suspect that’s true, but I haven’t figured it out yet either. All I’ve noticed is that, often, you have to be able to “see” what you’re trying to do backwards somehow, or inside-out.
Sort of reminds me of untying a nasty knot in a pile of string.
absolutely! just ask your local computer scientist. there’s an algorithm one can use to recurse through the vertices and find their optimal positions. i remember covering the algorithm years ago in a college course but i can’t recall its name at the moment… my internal stack has overflowed many times since then
Quite a pleasantly different and well crafted game. It does seem that you can attack it logically, although I have had to find a “good” start point, before diving in. Level 12 next, although I doubt I shall go much further because it has become much of the same, just bigger and taking longer to solve, in much the same way that adding another layer to a Tower of Hanoi roughly doubles to solution time. The stats of people taking thousands of minutes is not for me. I’ll draw back well before that level.
Nice way to pass an idle moment though.
i got to level 5 then my brain got hurted, you should go to the skip a level section and type in level 30. it looks like skribles i wonder if anyone has got that far by playing
Well, if you draw out a Pascal’s triangle and read the numbers off in a diagonal line going down and across you will see the sequence
1,3,6,10,15,21,28,36,45 which is the number of vertices in each level ( I only checked up to the 45 vertex puzzle, but I guess the others will pan out correctly. ( your 0,1,2 is incorrect )
I have not yet worked out how he decides on the number of vertices with 2,3 and 4 limks for each level. On the face of it this looks more random, but I doubt that it is. Using just two links for some vertices is rather odd, it does not make the puzzle any harder, but just clutters the screen up with an extra spot.
I think there must be a knack to seeing what is going on because it wasn’t really that hard for me.
What I did was pick any point an click on it and it illuminates the ones it is connected to it. I moved it to about the middle of its associate points. I do this for about half the points then I start to group points that are linked either linearly or in triangles so that those do not have intersecting lines about them. Then what remains are points that need to be pulled or moved to Flip parts of the surface that is being un-crumpled over.
It seemed to work. Level 7 took me about 5 minutes, which may be way too long. Don’t know.
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