Sorry

Sorry for the inactivity, but it does seem that I’m not one that can stick to blogging. Or puzzling. Honestly, I haven’t made any puzzle for quite a long time. My most recent works were a puzzle for Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2018 (in March) and a round for 24-Hour Puzzle Championship 2018 (in April). And as far as I know, now is September. So yeah.

I decided to shift my puzzling news to Twitter instead: @chaotic_puzzles. Although even then, because I, well, haven’t really made more puzzles, it doesn’t have new content. But when I do (and I will, considering GPH’19 and 24HPC’19 are likely), I’ll post them there and not here.

What occupies my time? Recently it’s mainly two things: Puyo Puyo Tetris (in which I spent a whole lot of time in) and a Discord community for The Genius (the Korean TV series, now fan-made and online).

So… yeah. I should probably call this blog dead now. Sorry.

Small update in January 2021, if you happen to be reading this: I’m moving my puzzles to my personal site, chaoticiak.github.io. It’s going to be a long project, though; I don’t know how long it will take (since I will likely also want to make my puzzles have more uniform graphics, test them for anything broken that I overlooked years ago, and such). Once the puzzles have been ported, I will likely delete all my past blogs, including this one. If you want to leave a comment on a puzzle, might be best to e-mail me or mention me on Twitter (above).

Also, I know solution images are down, from several years ago when Dropbox took down the Public folder serving as a web hosting service. (I was hotlinking to solution images in my Dropbox Public folder.) I’m not planning to put them back up on the blog; see also the aforementioned move to my site.

Broken blog

My blog is horribly broken after Dropbox removed their public links feature some time ago, huh. I’ll try to get around to fix that… hopefully. If I’m not lazy. For the time being, all answers and solutions and perhaps several other links are broken; comment if you want some.

Anyway, I am writing a couple of puzzles, although not here; they are either lazy one-off attempts in Puzzlers Club, or more dedicated puzzles for various events. Which is why you’re not seeing any on this blog.

I wish I’ll get around to try cleaning up my blog or something. Cull out the obviously bad puzzles, leaving only the good ones intact. If that happens, I might also wipe all of my blogs, only putting up one as an archive of all my good puzzles. But until that time comes, it’s not going to happen yet, and so you can still indulge through this and its brokenness.

To end this post, have a silly metapuzzle:

 

Useful Worker Employment
“Did you drop a meeple off the board?”
SEAFOOD TRAIN
AREAL ROBOT
COAL RAG
EELS LAID OFF

Too Lazy with a Blog

Apparently I’m too lazy to keep up with the blog format. I do write some puzzles occasionally, but I mostly share them with the Discord server I’m in, Puzzlers Club. (Which in turn is a spin-off from Patzers Club.) As it is, I just dump a Puz-PRE link without any other comment, and let them solve it. (Or otherwise, I usually take a picture of the puzzle grid, since somehow I write my puzzles on paper again, if not on Puz-PRE directly; only rarely that I make a clean image like the other puzzles in this blog.) But in any case, I didn’t have to write… like, a formal blog post like the other puzzles I have. I’m too lazy, I guess.

So… I guess that means either I need to get back to post more puzzles here, or otherwise make a new format for posting puzzles. I once posted a puzzle on Twitter, although that’s a ridiculous puzzle. I might probably move over to Twitter, but not sure. For the moment, the best way to get my puzzles is in fact to join Puzzlers Club on Discord.

But since I’m sure you want something, here are a few puzzle-related things:

  • I invented the genre Maximal Archipelago, that appeared in World Puzzle Championships a month ago. I heard it got tied third place among the many innovative genres submitted?
  • I wrote another genre together with some Puzzlers Club people. Cyclones: Put a positive integer to each circle such that a circle with number n cannot reach any other circle with number n within less than n steps (along adjacent circles), and can reach exactly two other circles with number n within exactly n steps.
  • I wrote a few puzzles for a Puzzlers Club puzzle collection thing, and I was particularly happy with a couple of them. But I can’t share them because they are part of the collection. So I guess you just need to join Puzzlers Club.

And yeah, I’ll update with my decision later, on whether to keep this blog for puzzle-related things or move elsewhere.

More Tiny Puzzles

Update on 20-Aug: New cryptics.

I’m so terrible at keeping my blog updated, eh. Here’s a not-so-standard logic puzzle and two standard not-logic puzzles.

Snake Locate a snake in the grid. The snake is a sequence of shaded cells that do not touch itself; that is, if two cells share a side, then they are consecutive cells in the snake, and if two cells share a corner (but not a side), then they are separated by one other cell in the snake. Clues outside the grid tell how many cells in that row/column are part of the snake.

…except, my grid got scrambled. The grid is 5×5. I know the endpoints of the snake are on R1C1 and R1C3. I also remember putting five 4’s to the grid, although I’m not sure in which rows/columns. (A row/column only gets one clue.) Can you solve it anyway?

Cryptic crossword clue Well, what it says. Here in the Patzers Club Discord server, for some reason there are a bunch of cryptic clues being thrown about, and I end up making a few. Most of them are easy. Some of them might be unfair, although I tried ditching everything that Patzers Club considered unfair, so hopefully all here are clean.

  • Bathing resort in a country (5)
  • Finished in Indonesian (4)
  • Flipped picture made unique puzzle (4)
  • He can’t smile without the middle figure-eight (10)
  • Irregular dragon skin endlessly new (7)
  • No other mother had the first half stack of hay (3)
  • One’s neighbor tinkers with one’s initials (3)
  • Olahraga mulai setengah enam (5) (This is an Indonesian cryptic. The surface reading roughly translates to “sport starts at half to six”.)

Many Tiny Puzzles

With me considering to clean up my blog (see previous post), plus all sorts of other distractions, I might not post new puzzles for some more time. (As if you waiting almost two years weren’t enough.)

…proper puzzles, that is. I’m in a Discord server. For some reason, it’s much easier for me to post puzzles over there. Probably part of it is the fact that I don’t need to make a proper blog post or something. Probably part of it is because the puzzles I posted were all tiny, not even over 5×5. But now that I get around to it, have all that I have so far!

Continue reading →

Oops

Yeah, I’m so terrible at managing my blog, especially since I’m not producing any content. I should get back to making puzzles, but in the middle of so many other distractions…

I’ll try to fix up my puzzles here. Partially to bring their posts to the current template (better rule explanations, simpler difficulty rating, etc), partially to get their images up to date, partially to actually check if they are in fact solvable and provide at least the solution grid… speaking of which, I also need to bring my solution grids outside Dropbox after they ditched the Public folder. Yeah, when I’m not procrastinating. It might be on a new blog (which would make me free of this ungrammatical “chaos at the sky” thingy!), but we’ll see.

Rants about Board Games

I should be studying for my midterms and probably write more puzzles for this blog, but I’m writing this anyway. Two quick rants about certain aspects of board games.

Carcassonne is good as is. You don’t need to add the variant of holding tiles in hand to make it “more strategic and less luck”. Or rather, the standard game and this variant appeal to different people. The standard game is about risk management; you want to leave your options open so whatever tile you’ll draw, you have a good spot for it. The holding tiles one clearly removes this part, so it’s more about setting up good places based on what tiles you have in hand. This also applies to Kingdom Builder and other such stuff.

There’s no such thing as multiplayer solitaire, no such thing as no player interaction. Any competitive (at least two-player) game has player interaction, unless your objective is to get a personal high score instead of beating the other players (in which, go play yourself and not with others). Take Yahtzee as an example. This has the absolute smallest amount of player interaction; namely, you can’t interact with each other players directly, changing their rolls or whatever. But there’s still player interaction. If you’re leading, you adjust your play to take small/moderate moves but guaranteed points; if you’re trailing, you adjust your play to make big, risky moves that can potentially propel you up. The only reason your play style can change is because there are other players, so that’s most certainly player interaction. This also applies to Reiner Knizia’s Decathlon. And don’t talk to me about Dominion; it has much more player interaction than that, even if you don’t have attack cards or anything; you have market play, you watch the Province pile depleting fast, you change what you’re doing. No game has absolutely no player interaction. No direct interaction, yes, but there’s always some indirect interaction.

Okay, that’s all I can think of for now.

Long time no see

It has been so long since my last post, huh. Yes, I’m distracted by many things that I didn’t get to write puzzles or do anything worthy to post here. I’m still active on my Twitter (@chaotic_iak) and elsewhere. A random collection of tidbits on what I did since New Year:

Operating System is a difficult course. I don’t understand why it’s a required course.

Holographic algorithms are interesting. And I gave my first seminar talk; yes, it’s about holographic algorithms.

I proved NP-completeness of NOT-1-IN-3-SAT (given a 3-CNF formula, find an assignment so that each clause has 0, 2, or 3 true literals (hence “not 1”)). In fact, I proved NP-completeness of PLANAR-NOT-1-IN-3-SAT (above, but the formula is also planar).

I did Google Code Jam this year; I ranked 68th in Round 3. That’s my best performance.

We did IPSC this year. We ranked 15th; that’s also the best performance for me, one rank up from in 2014. (I’m not sure about others. Also, we ranked 61st in 2015; that was not a good year.)

I bought a majority of my board games in this period. I forgot which were bought before this, so have a list: 6 nimmt!, 7 Wonders, Alchemists, Bohnanza, Carcassonne, Castles of Burgundy, Citadels, Coup, Dominion (Base, Intrigue, Seaside, Prosperity, Empires), Empire Engine, Forbidden Island, Last Will, Manhattan Project, Race for the Galaxy, Red7, Steampunk Rally, Sushi Go!, The Grizzled. And I’m not ashamed to say that I might buy some more this year. I need to think how to bring them back home.

I also spent more money on video games this year than all previous years combined. ($96.97 vs $30.31 from the records I can remember… and this year is still going.)

I reached new levels of furry trashiness. I’m much more active on Twitter after a friend I met on FurryMUCK brought me to his Twitter circle. I’m also more active on F-List. I wrote a few short stories (all fetishy; go search my Twitter if you want).

Surprisingly, I did Puzzle GP, so I wasn’t completely detached from puzzling world. But I think I only wrote 2-3 puzzles during this entire period.

I apparently invented a Zendo variant called Graph Zendo. As you can expect, it’s Zendo, but the koans are graphs. The combinatorial graphs, with vertices and edges. I played/mastered a few games of it on Super Duper Games.

So there you have it. We’ll see if I return back to posting here any time soon or whether I need to make another of these posts later.

Year-End Post???

Boy, I neglected this blog for so long. What did I do this year? In no particular order…

1 August: I made Rock, Paper, Scissors, which is probably my best game to date aesthetically. I still need to learn spriting. This one took quite a good amount of tinkering and spanned over the first half of my summer break (the entire July). Level design is hard.

31 December (yes, literally yesterday): I finished making JAM3 Game, a match-3 game that is as far away as Candy Crush Saga as I can make it. About four hours of development spanning over three or so days.

12 October: I bought Dominion. Three days later (after midterms were done), I played it with friends for the first time; people were instantly hooked. Three days later I ordered Dominion: Intrigue. Fast forward two months; on 9 December, my orders on Dominion: Seaside and Dominion: Prosperity arrived. We managed to sneak in several plays after final exams, before my friends gone back for winter break. I still hope they will get the deserved amount of plays during the next semester.

14 August: My interest on board games began, after for the first time coming to a board game store/meetup with a friend. I started browsing for board games, contemplating to buy them for a ridiculous amount of time, and bugging my friends to consider them as well. So far I’ve only thrown my money on those four, but I am indeed considering to buy some more again over this winter break.

7 November: My best relative performance on a puzzle test: Snake Variations Contest 2015, ranking 5th. If I have the time and money, I’d certainly like to actually do puzzle tests like World Puzzle Championship or 24-Hour Puzzle Championship, to actually compare myself with the world.

30 December: My provisional grades for this semester were out. I’m certainly very proud of two particular courses: Computation Theory (99.8%) and Introduction to Graph Theory (98.6%). Newfound love of graph theory. I did know I liked computation theory before taking the course, though; after all, I did have my Games are Hard page.

16 January: MIT Mystery Hunt happened. The only puzzle I made was Polyglot, but I contributed to several other puzzles; I forgot which ones. My memory is apparently terrible.

As betaveros pointed out: 9 December: I told the entire world about my kinks (might be considered NSFW).

I can’t remember other particular things I did in 2015. Oh well.

Well, good bye 2015, welcome 2016.

Dominion

I bought Dominion. That’s the first Eurogame I’ve bought. Okay, I played a bunch of other Eurogames before at a board game shop (while they are opening and hence playing is free; they didn’t have Dominion, though), but none of them was bought. On retrospect, I should have bought some; they are probably cheaper than this $40 for Dominion, but oh well.

Here as college (university, whatever) students, we need break time. While I do play computer games and what else often, sometimes it’s good to play board games with friends. This has never been a regularity until when I brought Saboteur and Bang! from home, though; added with Catan that my friend bought and the usual French deck of cards for some general fun, we started playing regularly.

At some point, we discussed about buying another game, because why not. A few came to my mind. Carcassonne was rejected by a friend because he has played it and it wasn’t fun. I didn’t even propose Paperback because nobody would play an English-heavy game. I played Quantum on Board Game Arena quite often, and I enjoyed it, but it’s probably difficult to teach. Also, it’s awfully expensive on the online market here, and international shipping is equally expensive. Other Eurogames didn’t quite come to my mind, so we settled with Dominion. It was initially mostly a joke, but the more I thought of it, the more I wanted to get my hands on a physical copy of it. Also, it would be the first time ever I bought a Eurogame.

And thus the deed was done. I actually ordered it a few days ago, and it arrived yesterday. It will be left there until the midterm week (next week) is done, though, because my friends are busy studying. (I’m also studying, but not as much; after all, I’m still typing this post.) Let’s just hope I don’t have the impulse to buy much more and drained my money that’s supposed to be for my life here…

Also, just because, I observed that the most common confusion for novice Dominion players is the text “+1 Action” (and “+2 Actions”). Most players think that you need to pause your resolution on that card to play another action immediately. (It actually means you get one extra Action you can use later in the turn, but you need to finish the card first before using it.) Which just means I should play my first game with some tokens to represent Actions and Buys.