Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle

I like the puzzle! Too much flashing at the end there, either tone it down or put an epilepsy warning on it.

• tempestn · 1481 days ago

  I had the same thought. Just made me wonder, are there browser extensions, or maybe even full OS overlays for people with epilepsy that will automatically filter out any potentially problematic flashing? Edit: Unsurprisingly it appears I'm not the first to have thought of this, at least: https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/making-screens-safe-those-p...

I figured it was conrad barski the moment i saw the art. I like that style.

I thought I had to keep the dog and rabbits separate, which really stumped me for a bit. It would be neat if the conditional statements emphasized and deemphasized based on whether their condition was currently met.

• taberiand · 1481 days ago

  I made the same assumption and didn't even try putting the dog and rabbits together, but I completed the puzzle (at least I'm pretty sure I didn't overlap them, there was a lot of back and forth)

  • kxjabzjej · 1481 days ago

    I find it amusing that this is driven by the particular visualisations of the characters. I.e. if it were a chicken and a rabbit would you have also made this assumption?

    • krallja · 1481 days ago

      I didn't even realize two animals could be on the same node at all until I needed to get both rabbits to the carrot.

    • justsomehnguy · 1481 days ago

      For me it's a variant of a classical "move a wolf, goat and cabbage across the river", where you can't have some of them on the boat together, because it would be eaten.

      • PebblesRox · 1480 days ago

        A fun Easter egg would be to have the dog eat the rabbit if both of them are on the boat node.

    • taberiand · 1480 days ago

      If it was a chicken and rabbit I think I would have tried to overlap them

• LeoPanthera · 1481 days ago

  I did keep them separate, but still solved it.

• Yajirobe · 1481 days ago

  How do I interact with the website? It's just a static image for me

  • elrobinto · 1481 days ago

    On mobile Firefox for me after a while I worked out it was drag and drop on the characters

  • mathieuh · 1481 days ago

    I’m on iPhone but it’s just tap-and-drag for me

  • jez · 1480 days ago

    I had the same problem. I was trying to click on things but not drag. Maybe if one of the animals is clicked but not dragged, it could expand and immediately get small, as if it had been dragged 0 pixels?

Cool puzzle and nice art. Too much flashing at the end. Concept reminds me of the indie game Baba is you: https://hempuli.com/baba/

• mgdlbp · 1481 days ago

  Hmm, the style of the OP and that landing page reminded me of another web game I saw a few years ago with a philosophical theme, maybe a game jam entry? Kind of bothering me that I can't recall the name. It was an abstract simulation of the course of a human life: units of "time" spawned regularly in the middle of a black screen. These gravitated towards the cursor and had to be guided to text spaced around the screen: play , grow , work , etc., which all needed to be regularly tended to, with more and more "responsibilities" appearing as time went on. Some day there'll be an AI search engine for 'tip-of-my-tongue' media. But what will have grown faster? The ability to catalogue things in the world, or the depth of obscurity of things that can be catalogued? Edit: got it, remembered the dev's domain: https://faedine.com/games/spendyourtime/

  • rvanlaar · 1481 days ago

    Thanks for sharing. That was a fun game.

  • mgdlbp · 1478 days ago

    Oh, how the subconscious did answer! The Ludum Dare entry I was thinking of is Notch's similarly minimalistic Drowning in Problems . There's also the classic, Alter Ego .

It took a while, but I got it! It's like the Wolf, goat and cabbage problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf,_goat_and_cabbage_problem

• benj111 · 1481 days ago

  You mean the fox, chicken and grain problem? I wonder if this just gets localised to typical staple, typical predator and its prey? I guess cabbage and wolf is eastern Europe / Germany?

  • praptak · 1481 days ago

    Wolf-goat-cabbage is definitely the version which is popular in Poland.

    • benj111 · 1481 days ago

      Coyote, turkey and corn? Lion, cow and millet? Redback spider (or any native fauna really), kangaroo, can of fosters? I don't know how the Japanese would do it. I was going to go with fish, but the puzzle would need reformulating for that.

  • gspr · 1481 days ago

    Norway has wolf, sheep and various things the sheep eat (I've seen variants cabbage and bales of grass). We also have a variation where everyone shifts down a step and there's a missionary "above" the wolf.

  • jonah · 1481 days ago

    Ah yes, "the river crossing problem"! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_crossing_puzzle

Great game, more levels and maybe a countdown for animals that will eat other animals (and end the game) if they are left on the same pad for too long.

• Jverse · 1481 days ago

  I disagree about the countdown. It wouldn't change the actual puzzle and arguably wouldn't make the game more fun to play for most people.

• 7thaccount · 1481 days ago

  A timer would only be fun for me in order to compete with friends. Not a distracting one that you can see while playing, but a time at the end with the number of the puzzle (assuming more get made) would be helpful for sharing.

That was fun to figure out

Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg

I wish I could see the icons that the rabbit and dog are standing on

Some neat concepts here. Aside from the mostly cosmetic qol issues other commenters mention, I also wonder if the game will get repetitive. It's hard to tell with only the one level but I imagine there might be some recurring patterns that the player will pick up on after playing for a bit

I have to say the fact that I was able to figure out how the puzzle worked - what I was meant to do - with no instructions in about 60 seconds is a good sign. I'm also immediately kind of addicted to this....I really like it. The one thing that annoys me is that I can't see what a symbol is if the dog/bunny is on it because it's covered up. It's hard to remember when there's so many. Some transparency or slight design adjustment would fix this easily.

• quickthrower2 · 1481 days ago

  I also like that you can make a few mistakes and still solve it.

  • perihelions · 1481 days ago

    Are there even any dead states?

    • quickthrower2 · 1481 days ago

      Yes. From beginning: Dog right, dog right, dog up.

      • runxel · 1480 days ago

        And you have to reload the page then... Should have been a "back" button or smth!

    • 7thaccount · 1481 days ago

      Oh yeah, I had to reset once lol. It has to do with getting a couple of characters stuck in the arrow trap without being able to get someone on a tree to escape...I think

    • starkd · 1481 days ago

      Not sure what I am missing. But all the possible moves lead to dead states. That being said, not sure what the transition labels mean. "Somebody at bone", "Somebody at carrot" or "nobody at bone" means nothing to me. I suspect there's another game that I don't know about that would provide the context.

      • tomerv · 1481 days ago

        The path with that label is blocked unless the condition is fulfilled. I don't think it relies on any prior knowledge (at least nothing specific I can think of)

        • starkd · 1481 days ago

          ahhh ok. It is a precondition. That helps!

      • Jtsummers · 1481 days ago

        It's entirely self-contained. "Bone" is a node in the graph, put either a bunny or dog on the bone and that "somebody at bone" path will be enabled because its condition will be enabled.

• Beltiras · 1481 days ago

  I second the UX of clearer way of showing the icon the player pieces are on. I don't know if transparency is the way to go. Maybe the shape of the node can differ.

  • benj111 · 1481 days ago

    Colour coding?

• somedude895 · 1481 days ago

  I didn't understand the conditions at first. I think it would be good to have visual feedback on what the issue is when trying to make a forbidden move, e.g. trying to move through "somebody at Carrot", the condition and the Carrot field should be highlighted together.

  • lloeki · 1481 days ago

    Having a knack for these, I found these "lack" of hints (understanding goal, covered tiles, no precondition failed) to be part of the game, and making deduction/memory work for it. There was just enough for me to understand it. Had these hints been there I'd have been bored rather quickly.

    • qwertox · 1481 days ago

      I agree. It's similar to how Doom was initially whereas now every game is filled with explanations.

      • MattRix · 1481 days ago

        That might be because most modern games are much more complicated than Doom. It’s also possible that modern game designers don’t want people to abandon the game before having a chance to really get what the core of it is about. Don’t get me wrong, there is still a place for games with mystery and obscure mechanics etc, but it doesn’t make sense for most games to be like that. It’s just an unnecessary way to keep away players that would otherwise love the game.

        • drdec · 1481 days ago

          I think that it is also that there are more resources for in-game help on modern hardware.

      • hyperhopper · 1481 days ago

        But there is a difference between a subtle hint and the MegaMan/navi style "hey listen! Here are several paragraphs to read" Play through portal with developer commentary, that's a masterpiece on how to use hints well without players even realizing. Things like how hallways are structured, where light is shining, etc.

        • menesss · 1480 days ago

          Wait, which MegaMan game has a verbose tutorial?

    • MattRix · 1481 days ago

      There are games where figuring out what to do is the goal, but this game has an good enough design that it really doesn’t have to be one of those. Many older games use that kind of obscure design as a crutch to appear more interesting and difficult than they really were.

    • furyofantares · 1481 days ago

      If you have a knack for them, you can probably just avoid making illegal moves and not worry about it. Reinforcing the rules of the puzzle when you try to violate one is a good idea.

    • galangalalgol · 1481 days ago

      Only thing I didn't know at first was that I assumed multiple conditions were or instead of and. Also, people are talking about flashing lights? I get to the completion criteria with the dog on the bone and the rabbits on the carrot and the game doesn't end. I can keep playing, no lights. Is there more?

      • threecoins · 1481 days ago

        You need to have both rabbits on carrots

        • galangalalgol · 1481 days ago

          There is only one carrot, they are both on it.

        • galangalalgol · 1480 days ago

          Bah, was using darkreader, hurray flash lights!

        • bentcorner · 1480 days ago

          It was not obvious to me until the very end that you can have overlapping animals, my gut instinct is to treat this similar to a "wolf/lamb/cabbage" kind of puzzle and keep the dog and rabbits separate.

      • lloeki · 1481 days ago

        > I assumed multiple conditions were or instead of and Same, so I tried, and it was very obvious that it didn't work, so, and. Discovering that was, to me, part of the whole experience that makes it rewarding.

• eequah9L · 1481 days ago

  > The one thing that annoys me is that I can't see what a symbol is In a similar vein, when both dog and bunny are on one field, I can't choose which one to pick up.

  • baq · 1481 days ago

    If you’re fast enough you can pick up one, drop somewhere and pick up the other when the first one is animating back.

    • 83457 · 1481 days ago

      This is the way. Moving also reveals the location they are on, if obscured.

  • alexvoda · 1481 days ago

    Didn't realize that was possible. I thought they were never supposed to meet and solved as such.

• etrautmann · 1481 days ago

  I love this - also had a hard time with remembering covered icons. Perhaps a tiny offset of the dog/bunny, or even a size difference would help.

• 7thaccount · 1481 days ago

  Took me about 2 minutes to figure out how to successfully move and quite a few more to fully solve it. A lot of fun!

• dalbasal · 1481 days ago

  Yes. I didn't get it. Hated it. Then got it. Completed it. Now I love it. Sign of a good puzzle... though the frustration/challenge balance is on a knife's edge with this game. Overall, yeah. It has the feel of a clever, loveable game... how it comes together. Great work. I love these postings. Very artistic.

• drcode · 1480 days ago

  Honest question: What kind of design change would you make? I am struggling to think of a good solution that doesn't involve making pieces smaller, which I don't want to do. One option is that a subtle version of the location image pops up next to the location space if it is occupied

  • josephpmay · 1480 days ago

    Maybe change the animal picture to have them holding the item in their mouth?

  • maxloh · 1480 days ago

    Being able to move all animals in the same circle. Right now you could only move the upper one.

  • dynamite-ready · 1480 days ago

    Just display the animals side by side, when they sit on the same node.

  • PebblesRox · 1480 days ago

    It would be fun to have the characters integrate with the node images, as if you are dropping them into little worlds. E.g. when you move a rabbit to the boat node, the boat now has a little rabbit poking out of it. It would be similar to those combined emojis [0] I recognize that this is a really bad idea from a usability/discoverability perspective, but wouldn't it be charming! [0] https://emojikitchen.dev/

Since he could use lights, giving accessible paths green highlight and red to the opposite, would save players some time and become intuitive, or destinations bg become red/green, had fun

I'm convinced there is only one way to solve this: Write a program to unroll the constrained state transition diagram into an unconditional state transition diagram and find the shortest path. The unrolled version would still be pretty small so you can just iterate over it.

• tgv · 1481 days ago

  You'd have to do that for VxVxV, because there are three different objects (although there's some symmetry). Solving a puzzle is often described as path finding.

  • mudrockbestgirl · 1481 days ago

    The vast majority of states is not reachable, so you can roll out the full tree from the starting state and it's going to be very small. Even the super-naive approach of unrolling the full state space is only 6^7 which is a big waste because connections are very sparse but even that's not big, it just wouldn't scale to larger problems.

• sooyoo · 1481 days ago

  That's an interesting statement. Because I actually don't think it's true. (Well obviously it's not and you were joking, but let's say you were not, for the sake of argument.) Humans do this differently from machines. We look for strategies and have smarts to on-the-fly develop and refine heuristics that rapidly allow us to intuitively do branch-and-bound like algorithms and in the end solve this even though we brute force very litte, if at all. That's why it took so long for machines to surpass us at chess or similar. It's a different approach. That's what makes machines better at certain things and humans at others. And there is a lot to be gained by trying to have machines also try human-like approaches to problems (strategy-developing rather than brute force).

• sterlind · 1481 days ago

  In other words, BFS over the state space of the puzzle, skipping previously-visited states? You don't actually gain anything by unrolling everything ahead of time; it'd actually be worse because you'd store all the memory and wouldn't stop when you get to the solution. And you can't really factor the state space into subproblems. Anyway, for this puzzle BFS would work, but classical planning in general gets astronomically exponential fast. It's a neglected field, not yet thawed from the last AI winter.

• marcodiego · 1480 days ago

  This can be easily solved by a class of algorithms called "search algorithms". Most famous ones are "Breadth-first search" and "Depth-first search". They have many variations like "Depth limited depth-first search" and "Iterative deepening depth-first search". If you include heuristics, then you have other variations like "A " and "Iterative deepening A ". These are pretty well known and relatively easy to implement.

  • jaredsohn · 1480 days ago

    Hacker news change the star into italics. The variations are called 'A*' and 'iterative deepening A*' (Need a backslach prior to the star to show it properly)

• fwip · 1480 days ago

  It was easy to solve in like, 2 minutes.

• babyshake · 1480 days ago

  This puzzle is definitely along the lines of a Leetcode-style traversal exercise

2. Make a daily one with a countdown to tomorrows one. 3. Profit.

• benj111 · 1481 days ago

  I've never come across 2 indexing. Is it meant to avoid off by one errors? Pointer arithmetic might be interesting though.

  • rmetzler · 1481 days ago

    1 is already done, isn’t it?

    • benj111 · 1481 days ago

      I don't know, it hasn't being listed, neither has 0.

      • peterkelly · 1481 days ago

        0. Be Conrad Barski 1. Create http://www.dogbunnypuzzle.com/ and post to HN

        • drcode · 1481 days ago

          Lol

        • benj111 · 1481 days ago

          Surely it should properly be: -1. be Conrad Barski 0. Create http://www.dogbunnypuzzle.com/ 1. post to HN

Petri nets: the game Nice one!

It's got too many rules for a puzzle imo. It does take an overly long time to figure out how it works.

• bastijn · 1481 days ago

  Took me less than 60 seconds. I'd say it's a perfect little puzzle. Next one you encounter you know the rules. I'd argue 2048 is harder to learn and that was a popular game.

  • neximo64 · 1481 days ago

    I actually thought 60 seconds was a bit too long. An easy to understand puzzle is probably more intuitive and < 15-20 secs from start/enough not to notice it took time.

    • tgv · 1481 days ago

      It's a puzzle for people with a CS degree. You need to recognize state transitions and conditions. Other people will take much longer.

The light show at the end gave me a chuckle. Pretty fun little puzzle.

It took me a moment to understand what the constraints meant, which says more about how tired I am than it says about the design, which is great! I don’t want to minimize the cleverness of the puzzle design, but I think it’s a visualization of a finite state machine. Not a novel challenge but a clever way to display it for sure.

• csande17 · 1481 days ago

  The one aspect that took me a bit to figure out was whether, to move between the house and the tree, you needed someone on BOTH the bone and the flower or just one of them. (It turned out to be both.)

Took me a while to figure it out as I assumed the labels on the lines to be dynamic. But once I got it, it was super fun to play. I wonder if you can algorithmically generate these puzzles and have human's curate them based on factors (joy, difficulty, visual appeal etc). Thanks for sharing. :)

• drcode · 1480 days ago

  Yes I have a puzzle generator program, will post more soon

Great work, it is very easy to understand but challenging enough to be rewarding. A puzzle once a day with a timer or an action counter to compare with your friend could be quite successful!

Word of warning: iPhone Firefox dark mode renders the game unplayable. Turn off dark mode to fix the issue.

Possible epilepsy warning on completion? Great little puzzle, thanks for making this and sharing it.

It doesn't work. Especially on mobile.

• sharken · 1481 days ago

  Must be a very rare browser, it works very well on Brave (mobile). Also, it is always more helpful to state the actual issue.

  • plank · 1481 days ago

    Solved it on mobile, but no signal that game was finished. On Firefox (android) here.

    • OJFord · 1481 days ago

      Worked fine for me on FF on Android. With third-party disabled uBO even.

  • eCa · 1481 days ago

    Safari on ios. I see no dogs or rabbits. I only realized that it was supposed to be interactive by reading the comments here. Edit: Same in Chrome on ios for me.

    • sharken · 1481 days ago

      Not sure what is going on, works fine on Safari (ios) here.

• niemenmaa · 1481 days ago

  Worked well on my Android`s Vanadium browser (chromium based).

• shever73 · 1481 days ago

  Worked fine in Ecosia on mobile

• Smaug123 · 1481 days ago

  This is one of the least useful bug reports I have ever seen. You could at least have reported your browser and operating system.

  • zeristor · 1481 days ago

    That seems to be a standard bug report to me.

I love it. Fantastic. Can you think of a way to re formulate the puzzle so that you can express the rules without words? Also, the dog / rabbit dynamic (as used in the classic dog/duck/grain river crossing puzzle) made me think that I had to chase the rabbits with dog, or that dogs and rabbits couldn’t share a node. Different animals might be better — rabbit and mouse, perhaps? Or even different coloured rabbits and different coloured carrots? The words thing though — that’s what you should work on next, I think. Good puzzles like this are word-free in the puzzle itself (Stephen’s sausage roll, English country tune). It would take this puzzle from great to excellent. Good luck. More please!

• schoen · 1481 days ago

  > Also, the dog / rabbit dynamic (as used in the classic dog/duck/grain river crossing puzzle) made me think that I had to chase the rabbits with dog, or that dogs and rabbits couldn’t share a node. Yes, I assumed first that no two animals could share a node at all until I was near the end (and saw that it would be necessary), and I still assumed that rabbits and the dog couldn't share a node ("the dog will eat the rabbit!") because of the river crossing thing, until someone in this very comment thread mentioned an unsolvable state that involved getting the dog a rabbit on the same node.

  • 01100011 · 1481 days ago

    > saw that it would be necessary FYI It's not necessary to solve the puzzle. Also it seems to have issues on FF/Linux because when I did stack a dog and a rabbit I could only then select the dog.

    • marcushill · 1481 days ago

      It is necessary to stack the rabbits on each other at the carrot, no?

      • 01100011 · 1481 days ago

        Oh haha, yeah I guess so then. Sorry, I missed that.

      • benj111 · 1481 days ago

        I did it without stacking until the very end. I wasn't sure if you just needed to get 1 rabbit on the carrot, or what.

      • megapatch · 1481 days ago

        It is common knowledge that rabbits stack rather naturally.

        • hnbad · 1479 days ago

          Don't stack your rabbits. That's how you end up with extra rabbits.

• benj111 · 1481 days ago

  >Can you think of a way to re formulate the puzzle so that you can express the rules without words? I'm imagining Haskell with emojis now.

  • erk__ · 1481 days ago

    Why imagine it? It is already possible :P https://gist.github.com/Erk-/be3ef032d31734b6f835edd9a9685af...

    • benj111 · 1481 days ago

      And I thought I had a sick and twisted mind...

• mypalmike · 1480 days ago

  > formulate the puzzle so that you can express the rules without words? Perhaps just a picture of the state icon (or one with a slash through it) and have it "light up" when the condition is satisfied.

That was very well made! Are there any more levels?

• drcode · 1480 days ago

  more levels will be coming

Looks excellent! Not sure if it’s an issue on iPhone or my IQ, but I can’t figure out what the rules are. I highlight an animal but can’t move it on what seems a bidirectional edge (no nodes light up). But sometimes can. I assume that should work always but it’s not for me. Also initially assumed I had to keep them separate, but comments here said no.

• pajko · 1481 days ago

  Seems like it's a bit buggy. Got a bunny stuck on a flower, unable to move it. Moved the second bunny to the same place and that made it unstuck.

  • 7thaccount · 1481 days ago

    I'd guess that's just how the puzzle works.

Yes you did. One of these a day, please. I really like the hand-drawn / doodled style.. it disarmed me, which was good because solving this required me to be patient and to unwire my brain a little

• drcode · 1480 days ago

  working on it

Please make that blinking after winning less... epileptic.

That was fun. Where is the next level?

Very nice! Really enjoyed figuring it out :)

I am completely lost. How do you play this?

• schoen · 1481 days ago

  Drag animals from one node onto another. Some edges are one-way (marked with an arrow). Some edges are only open when an animal is (or is not) on a certain space, as indicated by the text on that edge. More than one animal may share a node at the same time.

  • eps · 1481 days ago

    I am on an iPad and there are no animals anywhere on the screen.

  • Kaibeezy · 1481 days ago

    Surely figuring out the rules for oneself is an essential part of the puzzle?

Feedback: 1. It was good enough that I finished. This is success! Good job! 2. It took me too long to realize characters could occupy the same space, and the game doesn't draw characters occupying the same space very well. 3. The flashing lights at the end are too fast, slow them way down and it will still look good. You'll probably only have to change a number in your code.

• rexf · 1481 days ago

  Yeah, this was fun to solve. Re: 2, it seems intentional when two occupy the same space, 1 of them gets priority and has to be moved first? Ideally, you could pick which 1 of the 2 you could move, but removing this choice makes the puzzle harder. Re: 3, I don't like the flashing lights/colors at all. Putting a "You win" or "Congrats" <div> somewhere prominent on the page is probably enough. Flashing colors is very painful on the eyes.

  • txtsd · 1481 days ago

    If you try pulling from different directions, you can pull the one that you feel is lower.

  • arketyp · 1481 days ago

    I like the flashing colors. It reflects the cathartic pain in reaching a goal and it encourages the impulse to move on.

  • redanddead · 1481 days ago

    maybe OP could hire an animator to make a 3 second loop of a happy rabbit eating a carrot and a dog chewing on a bone, anything other than the flashing lights

  • 83457 · 1481 days ago

    The return to location animation helps here. Drag one animal and the one underneath is available to drag. Probably not very accessible but actually a fun, possibly unintentional, mechanic. Can also drag to see location icon underneath.

• txtsd · 1481 days ago

  My epileptic partner could not handle the flashing colors

• defrost · 1481 days ago

  >> It took me too long to realize characters could occupy the same space I solved it in under 15 minutes or so (multitasling and I didn't time myself) .. and at no point did I even attempt to have two characters on the same space or pass through each other .. other than the final goal of two bunnies on the carrot. Clearly: * I'm to dumb to have tried !! * It can be solved with with a "only ever one character on an intermediate non goal tile" .. although that is probably a slighty longer fiddlyier way of doing things.

  • Buttons840 · 1481 days ago

    I was the same. I only realized they could occupy the same space at the end. It was kind of a fun realization, so the author might keep it that way. Although maybe use an easier puzzle to teach people this fact about the game.

• jacobolus · 1481 days ago

  I found this particular puzzle pretty easy, but I have a lot of experience with puzzles (recently because my kid likes them). If you want to train novices up to solve very difficult puzzles of this style (or whatever style), start with very simple puzzles and build your way up in a sequence of steadily increasing difficulty, introducing only about one new trick at a time.

  • zeven7 · 1481 days ago

    I'm curious, are there any particular tricks you used for this puzzle? I basically just used reasoning and trial and error, but wonder what methods may have helped me solve it quicker.

    • jacobolus · 1481 days ago

      It’s helpful to me to “chunk” puzzles into specific sub-objectives. I split this one conceptually into a “top area” (house, bone, boat) and a “bottom area” (tree, flower, well, carrot). The tricky part of this puzzle is getting the rabbits down from house to tree. In order to move anyone from the top area to bottom area, you need to have someone in the bottom area shuffling back and forth, and also someone else in the top area. Specifically, you need to get one rabbit to the bone (dog must be at carrot) then move the dog back to the flower so the other rabbit can go down to the tree. Once one rabbit is in the bottom area the dog can move to the top area to help get the other rabbit down. Took me about 2 minutes to figure out what to do, and then another few minutes of dragging stuff around to execute. But again, I have been doing a lot of puzzles with my kid recently, so this kind of thing is top of mind.

  • kotenshu · 1480 days ago

    I disagree with this completely. The level of difficulty is just enough to get the brain properly churning with a manageable level of frustration without being completely impossible.

    • jacobolus · 1480 days ago

      You didn’t disagree with anything I said... I never said this isn’t a fun tricky-but-not-too-tricky one-off puzzle for out-of-practice adult puzzle solvers. (It has one key trick that someone who doesn’t do very many puzzles might take a while to figure out.) I only said it was pretty easy for me personally. I further claimed that if you want to train complete novices (I am thinking of my 6 year old here, or his less experienced 6-year-old friends) to solve very hard variants of this puzzle, you should start with easy puzzles and introduce one new trick at a time. If your goal is not to train novices to solve hard puzzles, then feel free to disregard this advice. There are some fun harder tricks that you can throw into this genre of puzzle (not included in this particular example) that if you tried presenting to my 6 year old would completely stump him. But after working his way up methodically he could be taught to notice and solve them.

  • djvdq · 1480 days ago

    Can you recommend any online puzzles like this?

    • jacobolus · 1480 days ago

      If you have kids, I would recommend the physical puzzles made by the company Smart Games. We have a bunch of them and they are generally fun, clever, sturdy, and sequenced pretty well. We also like the Rush Hour sliding car puzzles. I don’t know too much about puzzle video games (web or otherwise), but we have this week been playing the recently released game Railbound which is pretty fun and has some quite tricky puzzles.

When dog and rabbit are on the same node, it was somewhat hard for me to pick the right one to move (on mobile Safari), but I eventually managed. Very nice game.

• eequah9L · 1481 days ago

  Did you manage to? I couldn't choose the other one. (I forgot which one it was.) Even now on desktop it keeps picking up the dog and can't choose the rabbit.

• WesleyJohnson · 1480 days ago

  If the author is looking for ideas here, with minimal impact on the existing design, I'd recommend putting the most-recently dropped animal in the back to allow for cycling through which one you pick up. Another possibility is a "hover" state when when you mouseover a node with 2 animals, they animate quickly into a side-by-side orientation so you can easily pick which one you want to interact with.

I loved it. Could figure out the way it works with no instructions fairly quickly. There was never a moment where I got annoyed and wanted to put it down. It got me trying things all the time and I was never stuck in one place thinking for long. Yet, the solution wasn't something I just randomly found. Congrats! This is really good.

It's beautiful! Looks like the optimal solution is 26 steps: https://github.com/polkerty/dog-bunny-puzzle-solver

• wrbs · 1481 days ago

  Got the same. There are 200 ways of doing this (if you don't distinguish between the 2 bunnies when they're on the same tile, 420 if you do). If you merge together moves involving the same animal there are only 4 (with length 15). https://gist.github.com/wrbs/5824e9b17c55b5ad3d8467f93e12ed8... (svg graph of the 4)

• aaron695 · 1481 days ago

  Nice. I tried to fuzz this rather than use an exhaustive search. So random animals walk randomly. It gets stuck. So I added if no animal moves after 100 attempts, restart. But it seems to get stuck all the time. So it loops around mostly and eventually falls to the stuck position. I have to think about this, is the entropy such that you'll never practically escape by randomly walking? I feel like if I add more conditions it just becomes an exhaustive search with billions+ of times the extra calculations.

  • ajkjk · 1481 days ago

    I think if you refuse to duplicate states you'll get the solution pretty quickly.

  • klabb3 · 1480 days ago

    > I tried to fuzz this rather than use an exhaustive search. Shame. Shame. Shame. rings bell

  • tibbar · 1480 days ago

    This can be a useful approach when you have a very large number of states (as long as you also don't revisit states). In this case, there are few enough states to just BFS the fastest way directly.

Reminds me of baba is you.

I tried it on two different browsers and it does exactly nothing. It's just a diagram showing labels and lines? But nothing moves, and I don't see any rabbits or dogs. I checked developer tools, and there are no messages. Not really sure what it's supposed to do.

• userbinator · 1480 days ago

  I got this too (and yes, I did enable JS to try it out since the page title helpfully informed me it was a React App.) The lack of any errors or warnings in the browser console is definitely strange. I guess the puzzle is to... debug it?

Good job!

Nice puzzle! It would be nice to indicate whether the transition with two conditions is an “or” or “and”.

That was a fun puzzle. I like that it was intuitive and you could figure out how to play without a stupid tutorial. Well done

Game is stuck when rabbits and dog are on ship

• rsstack · 1481 days ago

  It isn't stuck, you lost :) Refresh the page to try again.

  • twayt · 1481 days ago

    Something about "losing" a puzzle doesn't feel right.

    • rsstack · 1481 days ago

      Same as putting the wrong letter in a crossword or making 6 wrong guesses in Wordle. Sometimes puzzles have to be started from scratch.

I had to read comments to find out its interactive...

On Firefox for android when you solve it (dog at the top, both rabbits at the bottom left) nothing happens. Other than that it's really nice!

• eequah9L · 1481 days ago

  Worked for me. All the fields flashed started and kept flashing different colors.

• hazzamanic · 1481 days ago

  could be that you have dark reader extension enabled?

  • TrianguloY · 1481 days ago

    Exactly. That's it. I suspected it later while reading other comments, checked on chrome and they flashed as expected. Too late to edit the post unfortunately.

Doesn't work on mobile was confused at first

Another small improvement: It says "React App" in the tab, which should probably be "Dogs and Bunnys" or similar.

Yeah this is fun and simple. Nice work!!

Nice one, finished in about 20 minutes, I think it can be seen as a variation of the classical (don't know the English name) "order the numbers from 1 to 9, whith a blank space", with some extra rules. By the way, on Firefox/Android a bunny flew away to never return when I was dragging it from the boat.

Is this playable on iPads? No element appears to be actionable... :(

• Jtsummers · 1481 days ago

  Yes. That’s what I played it on. Javascript disabled?

  • eps · 1481 days ago

    No, just stock Mobile Safari with a DNS ad-blocker. Nothing exotic.

    • Jtsummers · 1481 days ago

      So I finally pulled it up on my laptop, what's particularly weird about that is that all the resources when loading the page seem to be from the site, same domain. It's not pulling in resources from another domain that may be getting blocked.

• avindroth · 1481 days ago

  Same here. Thought the puzzle was obscure on purpose.

Intuitive and nice brain teaser. Should share it on some kid’s dedicated website. I bet they’ll love it.

It's basically a formal version of a classic sokoban game. I really like it.

• rmetzler · 1481 days ago

  Sokoban was also the association I had.

That was a lot of fun. Easy to figure out what the challenge was. Then puzzling, challenging gameplay and a satisfying conclusion in, I don't know, 15 minutes or so. Good work, well done, hope you do well with this.

My two cents: 1. Like other people I found the UX a bit confusing (figuring out that two animals can occupy the same spot, picking which one of them to move etc.) 2. This one seems hard for a first level, if it's addressed to a general audience. Even figuring out that some edges are directed is not obvious if you don't know about graphs in advance. You should build a tutorial for non-HN people. 3. Are there other levels? 4. Lights are flashing way too fast at the end. A text message would also be nice. Otherwise a great job! Playable and fun once you get into it. Would totally play again :D

I thought the dog would eat the bunny if they occupied the same space (and that stopping the dog eating the bunny was the point).

I love it. Post more!

Very cool little game. More levels please!

• drcode · 1481 days ago

  Working on it

I got all the rabbits and the dog to one node and then I could not move anywhere.

Very nice. But is there only one kevel or I just haven't figured out how to move to the next after completing it?

• 7thaccount · 1481 days ago

  I'm assuming the author just made the one level. Iirc Conrad Barski is a medical doctor that made the famous Land of Lisp book for teaching Lisp programming. A pretty creative person. I assume the fun for them was in creating this and getting feedback and not necessarily coming up with 50 levels.

  • drcode · 1480 days ago

    More levels will be coming :-)