Source: Day 15: Warehouse Woes

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given a warehouse containing floors (.), walls (#), boxes (O), and the player (@) plus a series of instructions ^V<>, move the player according to the instructions, pushing boxes (which in turn can push more boxes).

Calculate the sum of y * 100 + x for each box’s final position.

read more...

Another solver that I’ve been working on, after A Good Snowman Is Hard To … Solve?. This time, we have Sokobond! It’s a Sokobon… but with chemical bonds! Yeah, that’s a really good title.

The basic idea is you have a field of elements with (chemical accurate) free electrons):

Here we have 4 hydrogens (1 bond each) and a carbon (4 bonds). It should seem pretty obvious that the carbon should end up with a hydrogen on each end. The one last bit of interest: the element with the dashed border is the one we actually control, that will never change.

This eventually gets more complicated, adding:

• Modifiers that are placed on the map between squares:
  • One that strengthens bonds, turning a single bond into double into triple
  • One that weakens bonds, turning triple to double to single or breaking single bonds
  • One that rotates bonds as you move by it
• More elements, eventually hydrogen (1), oxygen (2), nitrogen (3), carbon (4), and helium (0)
• Solutions that require forming multiple elements at the same time

It’s a pretty neat puzzle game with 144 levels of increasing difficulty. Perfect to solve.

read more...

I enjoy puzzle games. I especially enjoy letting computers solve them for me 😄. Once upon a time, I set up a framework for solving random things. Let’s solve some more.

Today: A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build

It’s a Sokoban about making snowmen! You can push snowballs of three sizes around, collecting snow if you roll over it. You can push smaller snowballs onto bigger ones, stacking them. Or back off, in order to get around one another.

And that’s really it.

There are some interesting twists (multiple snowmen, the ability to leave and re-enter levels, and even a whole second ‘hard mode’), but at a basic level, it’s just pushing.

read more...