And here we have Part 2! It’s not been that long for you, but since the first part took six months for me to actually get around to writing it… well, this is much better!

Things get a bit more complicated this time, with buttons that can open/close doors and even holes in the floor and BOMBS. But what’s really crazy is how we actually get around to solving how to get to new sublevels this time… and how to take penguins back out of them. Things are getting complicated!

Here are all of the commits from part 1 up through part 2.

And here are all of the parts in this series so far:

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Months ago now¹, I started playing Gentoo Rescue (after seeing the Aliensrock video). At the core, it’s a Sokoban style puzzle game where you have to guide cute little sliding penguins to their color coded nests… but oh man does it start getting more complicated quickly.

On top of that, it has a really interesting nesting level concept–the level select screens are levels themselves. You can go several ’levels’ deep into levels or eventually further back out. And that’s just with how far I’ve gotten so far…

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Source: Day 12: Christmas Tree Farm

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Solve the knapsack problem.

…

…

But really, you are given a set of tiles (which all happen to be some subset of a 3x3) and a set of constraints–a MxN grid and how many of each tile to place. Count how many constraints are possible.

Tiles may be rotated and/or flipped.

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Source: Day 3: Lobby

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given a list of numbers, for each find the two digits in the number which if concatenated make the largest. Sum these values.

For example: 811111111111119 should be 89.

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Woodworm is a cute little PICO-8 puzzle game about a cute little worm… that eats wood. You can play it for free right now right here!

The goal is to turn this:

Into this:

There are a few rules to keep in mind:

• The block (and the worm) are affected by gravity

• The block can be split by into multiple pieces by eating it completely apart

  

• The worm can crawl up the side of blocks, so long as two (consecutive) segments of the worm are touching walls

  

And that’s really it.

So let’s solve it!

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And so it begins.

Freshly Frosted

It’s a cute little puzzle game about making a donut factory.

It’s a lot like Solving Cosmic Express in that it’s a ‘puzzle on rails’, you are basically routing around the grid from source to target. In the way, we have to go to certain tiles in a certain order (in this case, to apply toppings to our donuts).

Let’s do it!

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Source: Day 19: Linen Layout

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given a comma delimited list of substrings and a list of strings, count how many of the latter strings can be made up of any (repeating) combination of the former.

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Source: Day 17: Chronospatial Computer

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Implement a virtual machine. The machine will have 3 unbounded signed registers, 8 opcodes (see below), a variable parameter scheme (see below that). You will be given the initial values of the 3 registers and a program. Find the final output.

Instructions

Parameter specification

For instructions that can take reg/val, 0 to 3 (inclusive) are treated as literal values, 4 is register A, 5 is B, 6, is C, and 7 is an error (should never happen).

For instructions that only take val, it’s always a literal value in the range 0 to 7 (inclusive).

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Source: Day 7: Bridge Repair

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given a result and a list of numbers, determine if any combination of addition (+) and/or multiplication (*) using all the given numbers in order can return the result. Ignore order of operations.

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Another Rust Solvers puzzle: Cosmic Express. Basically, it’s a routefinding puzzle. You have a train that needs a track from entrance to exit, picking up and dropping off cargo on the way.

It’s actual a relatively simple puzzle, so far as things go, but one thing that’s interesting from a solving perspective is that branching paths really don’t work great with my solver code. Paths just have a crazy branching factor when compared to (for example) playing one of a handful of cards.

But it’s still an interesting puzzle!

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