Message #3738

From: mananself@gmail.com
Subject: A new class of puzzles in MagicTile: Lights On
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2017 05:42:11 +0000

Recently I added a new class of puzzles to MagicTile, the Lights On puzzles. They are similar to the traditional Lights Out puzzle, but based on different geometries of MagicTile. Clicking a tile toggles the adjacent tiles (tiles switching between ON and OFF). The puzzle starts from the all ON state and the goal is to get back to the all ON state. The all ON state looks better than the all OFF state. Hence the name Lights On.

Please download the latest MagicTile from http://roice3.org/magictile/ http://roice3.org/magictile/ , navigate to any tiling, you can see a new category "Lights On", in which are two variants: "Toggling Neighbors", and "Toggling Clicked Tile and Neighbors". The difference is whether the clicked tile itself is toggled.

Scramble and then solve just like any MagicTile puzzles, until you hear the beep. Reset works, but undo, redo and macros are not there, because these puzzles are not that complicated and I’m lazy.

The Lights On puzzles are trivial or simple for some small tilings. But they are not as simple and require critical thinking for bigger tilings. For some tilings, I find the variant "Toggling Neighbors" harder and sometimes the other way. That’s why I include both variants. Overall, the Lights On puzzles provide an easier class than the traditional twisty puzzles in MagicTile.

For Infinite Regular Polyhedra and 4D Skew Polyhedra, the Lights On puzzles don’t work in the skew (3D) view at this time. You can go to Settings -> Skew Polyhedra and switch "Show as Skew" to false to play such geometries.

This is my first time working on Roice Nelson’s MagicTile project. Repo location: https://github.com/roice3/MagicTile https://github.com/roice3/MagicTile Roice helped a lot in understanding the code, fixing my bugs, and suggesting improvements. I had fun building this feature. On this platform of over 100 tilings, implementing one feature with two variants means creating over 200 puzzles. There’s even an effort to add Mono support so that people can use it on Mac and Linux. (see discussion here: https://github.com/roice3/MagicTile/issues/7 https://github.com/roice3/MagicTile/issues/7 )

Fellow programmers, please bring your great ideas here! Previously I created a "Lights Out 3D" web app for polyhedra. And thanks to MagicTile, I brought the idea to Euclidean and hyperbolic tessellations.

Enjoy the new puzzles!

– schuma