itch.io

It is higher than that :P ofcourse if you want to lower the cycles, cost often grows exponentially

I had a bunch of rooted solutions on F3 that all gave me 360i points, i was quite unhappy/confused about getting 360i on them as they were significantly faster, in todays update they all seemingly inexplicably went up significantly to as much as 397i for one (basically the score that I originally expected to get), but what triggered this is beyond me as no new non-root optimal solutions appeared. Its hard to try to get the most amount of points if I don't know what rewards points and what doesnt :P

Has something changed to the root scoring algorithm in last update?

It definitely seems to be quite an improvement in terms of usable screen real-estate :D

If your goal is to not hinder the unlocking of words, it might not be a bad idea to remove the 'visible' constraint on unlocking them since they are currently almost always off screen.

Also, I think this is a bug, but everytime I refresh, it seems like the game thinks I have zero unlocked words and they pop off until I've collected them all again (which is a bit distracting also :P)

(Edited: added section on the bottom)
The new scale seems to help for the most part except when you have 'extreme' solutions of your own :P Thats not really a problem I guess, while it does still mess with the other solutions it is also quite satisfying to see an absolutely huge cost :P Overall I think its fine currently, and while I personally still am a fan of log plots I don't think it is necessary at this point.

About the treshold list tooltip: I was referring to the part inbetween the two graphs. Overall I think they deserve to be promoted to a permanent spot on the stats page, considering their importance.

For marking the 'extreme' solutions as rooted.  I don't think it will be that simple, since it's not really a black and white thing. It can span the whole range from unrolling one iteration with 1 extra command all the way to some pretty extreme cases (I have seen dom's E7 no-longer-optimal intermediate scores that scale pretty well all the way until where he is now.

Edit: it would also be nice to be able to see the achieved tradeoffs in root (I'm not 100% sure that makes any sense in the current context). Currently you can kind of guess what happened based on the other graphs, but theres no guarantee. Particularly on G4 I am struggling, I even ended up finding a new best non-root solution that made my rooted solution take quite a hit on the upgrade but it feels like the highest root solution wasn't affected as much as mine, it would be nice to see its tradeoff as to know in what direction to search :

Edit edit: the dotted lines turn green when you've achieved them. It would be a nice touch to make them gold when they are an unique best since there is currently no way to tell which are unique :)

I have to say I agree with alion here, it would be nice to disable the code window entirely. As he mentions this is quite impressive, but it is also quite distracting. For me personally it does not contribute to the fun of the game in any way, and I can't say I would care much if I wouldn't unlock any words. I don't mean to be offensive in any way, just trying to give you my honest thoughts.

I'm not a fan of shadowbanning the 'extreme' solutions from the tradeoffs view. I spent quite a while trying to figure what the 875 cycles solution could have possibly been in D7, before I finally realised that because its not on the cost tradeoff list (which by the way is quite hard to find, only showing from hovering over some parts of the dotted lines, I think it would be much better if it was just a static part of the stats page), and therefore is probably one of those solutions you deemed 'extreme' and filtered out. And the fact that this happened to me even helped me figure this out, if I wasn't already aware of this I wouldn't be any wiser seeing the 875 solution in the cycles graph :P Maybe I would have never figured it out.

I also don't think removing them outright would be a nice solution, they definitely deserve some recognition :P

Also, having one set treshold where you just start shadowbanning them does have its own set of problems, such as deciding the exact treshold, for example levels E7 (I had a nice back and forth with someone but I couldnt see their cost yet and also couldnt communicate with them, ties into my other questions :P) and G4(not exactly sure if this qualifies as extreme or whats going on here) currently have such extreme solutions that kind of ruin the treshold graph.

Overall, I am still in favor of having a logarithmic cost graph rather :P It makes the most sense IMO, especially with how much the cost grows as you add conditions. I think a log(cost)-cycles or a log(cost)-log(cycles) might even be a nice fit for the game, similar to viewing a 2-parameter front for a genetic design algorithm.

Lastly, I've already mentioned this a couple times but I do have to agree with domnomnom, a community where people can chat with eachother about the game would be very nice :P You mention the possibility of a forum but live chatroom(s) where you can go back and forth quickly is more appealing (to me at least), hence the reason I proposed creating a discord server earlier :P

Why does it take a while before all solutions are upgraded when a new best is found (rather than just triggering an upgrade right away)? Whats the upgrade schedule? It feels like its been 2 days since the last upgrade.. :P

Also, upgrade might not be the best name for what usually equals to taking away peoples score :P maybe score normalisation or something might be a better term

Thanks for fixing G3.

I like out of the box solutions and that includes my D8 solution :P The exponential nature of the level makes it very attractive for unrolling, nothing wrong with that :P Especially because its just one level where it even is viable in the first place, and considering the cost tradeoff it will never affect the normal solutions.

If larger test cases are added, it will first of all start lagging the game quite hard and secondly, it will still always be more optimal to hardcode the bottom layers and add a proper iterative algorithm ontop of this. You could restrict the number of workers but this will invalidate a large potion of current solutions aswell as add significant difficulty for future players, and it will just bloat the root score instead if that option will be available.
Another alternative would be to just hard limit the cost but that would be quite lame. Overall I think you should just come to terms with the solution considering that it only really affects this level.

If the cost graph is the problem, why not make it logarithmic (for this level only maybe considering the exponential nature) and/or implementing a graph break?

I have indeed tried profiling it, which did further frustrate me :P

I have kept spoilers to an absolute minimum in these images:
The original version performs worst on input 13 with a max of 301 cycles, where, the A=D:y branch is hit 5 times. The improved version, which simply moves the A=B test up one space to exclude B join A when A=B:y, performs worst on input 26 with a max of 308 cycles, where the A=D:y branch is hit 8 times. This even makes it score 2 points less (357 vs 359..).

As you can probably understand, this makes it very frustrating to hunt for the 'best' 360 solution as it just feels like moving stuff around at random and preying to RNGesus. I'm not sure if this is fixable but I was hoping some of the "highly-regular" RNG's that I did notice in earlier levels could provide a consistent worst case for this level.

Im back to complain about G3 :P Its the last level that stands between me and a perfect real score.

This time, I am getting bodied by RNG. I have two near identical setups, where the only difference is that one branch of an if statement has 1 extra instruction. Everything is otherwise completely unchanged. The frustration I am facing is that the setup with the extra instruction in the if branch is actually performing better than the other one. (longer if case: max 301 cycles, shorter if case: 308 cycles on a different input). I can provide more details if you wish, to avoid leaving spoilers in public you can contact me on discord (L0laapk3#2010).

I assume you added more randomness to the test cases to ensure my previous broken solution fails, however it seems also necessary to add plenty of fixed RNG test cases (if such a thing is possible) to ensure the max cycles seems consistent.

Also, as a suggestion, it would be nice to be able to have notifications if your score is beaten, etc. Maybe it would be an idea to set something up for this? Something like a discord server with bot that announces new best solutions would be nice. :)

Edit: messed up the two solutions in my explenation

Interesting update :P

I do believe I'm on track to reach first for now, I still have to optimise X5 and start working on X6, I do think it will take until 2021 tho :)

Many of my contributions are low hanging fruit, however I'm particularly proud of E4 (2 cond) and D7 (2 cond and complete undercut of all existing implementations in both cost and speed).

It does say "may be running forever", however I was under the impression that you implemented loop detection by checking if the current state exactly equals any previous state which it definitely does. The implementation I made has a limit to zero chance of running for infinite duration which I thought the game actively prevented you from making.

Either way feel free to look at my G3 implementation or G3 save board, it contains nothing of significance assuming you've finished G3 once, G3 is a straight forward level and none of the G3 designs I made are ground breaking (best I got with a 'proper' implementation was 3*26 cost for 321 cycles before I converted it to this 'broken' working 3*24 version) and it just contains some rng seed testing otherwise :P

Hi there, great game!

I have found a buggy solution for G3. It triggers loop detection and shouldn't work, but somehow it still does. It's currently an unique best with 72 cost for 355 cycles. Let me know if you need more details.
You can contact me on discord at L0laapk3#2010.

By the way, is there a discord server or some sort of community chat for this game? That would be nice :)