Message #606

From: Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
Subject: Re: Magic 120 Cell Solve
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:36:56 -0800

Roice,

Bummer about the spam filtering problem. You’re right of course that
they should just whitelist all members. I definitely boot any member who
spams our group, no discussion or warning, so that would take care of that.

I didn’t know that you didn’t support macros. That indeed makes Noel’s
accomplishment truly heroic!

I’ve found that MC4D speed depends more on the size of the window than
on the size of the puzzle. Playback is blindingly fast if I shrink the
window to postage stamp size.

Good luck with that video!
-melinda

Roice Nelson wrote:
> Well, this is my third attempt to get this post through. I wrote
> yahoo last night and they responded that they recently upgraded their
> spam filters and my posts are getting marked as spam. I guess having
> links in your messages increases your spam-probability. Why they
> don’t have members of the group white listed I can’t surmise…
>
>
> With respect to playback, you can watch it in reverse the same way as
> in MC4D, that is load the log file, undo a single move, then select
> solve from the options menu. I need to support a "redo" playback as
> well. Your calc was quite accurate, because I played it back the
> other night (both to see the solution approach and to test the puzzle
> state engine with a full solve), and it took 40 minutes on my
> computer! Nope, I didn’t actually watch every second :) This was
> with the rotation speed maxed out, which turns the program into disco
> ball mode (only a single frame drawn per twist). I’m betting it is
> rendering limited, but my computer is slow in any case and many of you
> could likely get a quicker playback.
>
> I like Melinda’s idea to not render macro details as a way to compress
> playback. It’s not just the log files for Magic120Cell though - we’d
> need to implement macros first (the fact they don’t exist makes Noel’s
> solution all the more remarkable!).
>
> I like the youtube video idea as well, and may do a little hacking
> this week to skip frames for a compressed-solution youtube video.
> I’ll send a link if successful.