Message #1923

From: Roice Nelson <roice3@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Re: yet more new puzzles and a prize
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:54:15 -0600

They say imitation is the best form of flattery, so hopefully Andrey will
be happy to know I’ve already started copying his setup move and commutator
features :) I thought I’d get those and macros out together first, then
look at piece finding afterward.

I do know doing piece finding like I did in Magic120Cell would be
difficult, because I don’t yet have an internal representation of pieces in
MagicTile (just stickers). So I likely won’t do that soon, but it should
be easy to copy Andrey’s piece finding approach (shift+right clicking to
set all stickers of a given color to white, and to dim the rest). That is
mainly just a convenience over what is possible with the color settings,
but seems useful nonetheless. If you have a particular piece finding
functionality preference in mind, I’m interested to hear details.

Even though working without these features surely was painful on the
ET{3,7}, I bet that there was some satisfaction in having done it that way.
(?) I know for me, it feels more pure to not have too much help from the
software features. In the early days of MC4D, especially when going for
shortest solves, I used to write my setup moves down on paper! This made
things easier for me, but it felt like I had taken a step away from a pure
solve when doing so. In any case, how I wish I would have had Andrey’s
feature back then.

Cheers,
Roice

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 11:02 PM, schuma <mananself@gmail.com> wrote:

> Roice, thanks. Are you also planning on adding the piece finding function?
>
> This afternoon I took a look at the FT and found that all necessary
> algorithms were not very long. After solving the ET, I think solving FT in
> the current version is possible, although not easy. It’ll be another 20
> hours of switching colors, comparing a scrambled puzzle with a solved one,
> finding tiny pieces and keeping track of complicated setup moves. Not much
> different from ET, but possibly harder. But I haven’t got the determination
> to try it, yet. I don’t know if I should try it or not. Actually without
> trying, one cannot tell if, for example, setup, is easy or hard.
>
> Of course, with macros and even piece-finding, the solution will be much
> easier. If Andrey’s "automatic undo-setup" function is there, it will be
> even better.
>
> Nan
>