MatSeFi

@MatSeFi@lemmy.liebeleu.de

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Find Cow⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, this would work — but it comes with a subtle statistical bias: the character ‘W’ ends up underrepresented. With a naïve “avoid COW” approach, only about 25% of the grid will typically be ‘W’.

  A more elegant solution would be:

  • fill the grid completely at random
    • search for every “COW” cluster
      • whenever one is found, copy a random character from one cell in the cluster into another cell of the same cluster
    • Iterate until no “COW” remains

  That keeps the distribution much closer to uniform while still guaranteeing a valid puzzle. Then just insert the single “COW” manually wherever you want the hidden solution to be.

  Julia code example

  julia s= (320,180) #size m=rand([‘C’,‘O’,‘W’],s) #random init c=1 while c>0 #iterate till solved c=0 for i in 1:first(s) for j in 1:last(s) #check for ‘COW’ in each cluster of 3 and copy a character #from a rendom cell to an other random cell of the cluster if found if i>2 && m[i-2:i,j] ==[‘C’,‘O’,‘W’] #vertical c +=1 r =shuffle([1,2]) m[i-r[1],j] = m[i-r[2],j] end if j>2 && m[i,j-2:j] ==[‘C’,‘O’,‘W’] #horizontal c +=1 r =shuffle([0,1,2]) m[i,j-r[1]] = m[i,j-r[2]] end end end end

  The neat part is that this preserves an almost perfectly balanced character frequency.

  For comparison, the puzzle in the example image seems to contain roughly:

  C: ~260 (~25%) O: ~520 (~50%) W: ~244 (~25%)

  So the original author clearly used a different generation strategy.

  Possibly on purpose: visually, ‘C’ and ‘O’ are much easier to confuse than ‘W’. Reducing the number of 'W’s therefore increases the search difficulty. In that sense, the approach suggested by @Snazz@lemmy.world is probably preferable: keep the distribution mostly balanced, but intentionally bias it just enough to make the puzzle psychologically annoying.

  I wonder if there is a non iterative way to generate this puzzle with a ‘uniform’ character distribution 🤔

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Window alignment⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, at least thy were trying, whil other archtiects just use the rnd() function for placement:

  Spoiler

  Building with randomly posintioned windows

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely… Similar argument holds for the year btw. In that case it is better to treat a “day” or “year” as an artificial time constant and define them as 2π while skipping all the astronomical context. Otherwise you are free to write UT1D in a 2π notation also.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Bahh… The full day is 2π.

  • 12:00 is π
  • 15:00 is 3/2π And so on… Sane people use 2π = 𝜏 instead.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Small little shenanigans⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes Metals in general shild RF-Waves used to sample the image (and could get hot by that process)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Small little shenanigans⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think its not about the property of beeing a metall ist a bout beeing ferromagnetic (In that case probably not an issue because these bearing balls are usually out of some kind stainless steel. )

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Small little shenanigans⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow: Balls of Steel AND Darwin Award at the same time…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RAS Syndrome⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes the gamma rays even disinfect your wohle immune system… actually you are dead within 1min close the the handrails…