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&#x27;m not the first to have thought of this, at least: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tlo.mit.edu&#x2F;technologies&#x2F;making-screens-safe-those-photosensitivity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tlo.mit.edu&#x2F;technologies&#x2F;making-screens-safe-those-p...</a>

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

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

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?

I made the same assumption and didn&#x27;t even try putting the dog and rabbits together, but I completed the puzzle (at least I&#x27;m pretty sure I didn&#x27;t overlap them, there was a lot of back and forth)

I did keep them separate, but still solved it.

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

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

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?

How do I interact with the website? It&#x27;s just a static image for me

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.

Oh, how the subconscious did answer! The Ludum Dare entry I was thinking of is Notch&#x27;s similarly minimalistic Drowning in Problems. There&#x27;s also the classic, Alter Ego.

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&#x27;t recall the name.It was an abstract simulation of the course of a human life: units of &quot;time&quot; 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 &quot;responsibilities&quot; appearing as time went on.Some day there&#x27;ll be an AI search engine for &#x27;tip-of-my-tongue&#x27; 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&#x27;s domain: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;faedine.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;spendyourtime&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;faedine.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;spendyourtime&#x2F;</a>

Cool puzzle and nice art. Too much flashing at the end. Concept reminds me of the indie game Baba is you:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hempuli.com&#x2F;baba&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hempuli.com&#x2F;baba&#x2F;</a>

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

Norway has wolf, sheep and various things the sheep eat (I&#x27;ve seen variants cabbage and bales of grass). We also have a variation where everyone shifts down a step and there&#x27;s a missionary &quot;above&quot; the wolf.

Ah yes, &quot;the river crossing problem&quot;!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;River_crossing_puzzle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;River_crossing_puzzle</a>

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 &#x2F; Germany?

It took a while, but I got it!It&#x27;s like the Wolf, goat and cabbage problem<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wolf,_goat_and_cabbage_problem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wolf,_goat_and_cabbage_problem</a>

I disagree about the countdown. It wouldn&#x27;t change the actual puzzle and arguably wouldn&#x27;t make the game more fun to play for most people.

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.

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.

Reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg</a>

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&#x27;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 also like that you can make a few mistakes and still solve it.

I second the UX of clearer way of showing the icon the player pieces are on. I don&#x27;t know if transparency is the way to go. Maybe the shape of the node can differ.

Having a knack for these, I found these &quot;lack&quot; of hints (understanding goal, covered tiles, no precondition failed) to be part of the game, and making deduction&#x2F;memory work for it. There was just enough for me to understand it.Had these hints been there I&#x27;d have been bored rather quickly.

I didn&#x27;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 &quot;somebody at Carrot&quot;, the condition and the Carrot field should be highlighted together.

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

Didn&#x27;t realize that was possible. I thought they were never supposed to meet and solved as such.

&gt; The one thing that annoys me is that I can&#x27;t see what a symbol isIn a similar vein, when both dog and bunny are on one field, I can&#x27;t choose which one to pick up.

I love this - also had a hard time with remembering covered icons. Perhaps a tiny offset of the dog&#x2F;bunny, or even a size difference would help.

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!

Yes. I didn&#x27;t get it. Hated it. Then got it. Completed it. Now I love it. Sign of a good puzzle... though the frustration&#x2F;challenge balance is on a knife&#x27;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.

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

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

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

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&#x2F;discoverability perspective, but wouldn&#x27;t it be charming![0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emojikitchen.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emojikitchen.dev&#x2F;</a>

Honest question: What kind of design change would you make? I am struggling to think of a good solution that doesn&#x27;t involve making pieces smaller, which I don&#x27;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

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&#x27;m also immediately kind of addicted to this....I really like it.The one thing that annoys me is that I can&#x27;t see what a symbol is if the dog&#x2F;bunny is on it because it&#x27;s covered up. It&#x27;s hard to remember when there&#x27;s so many. Some transparency or slight design adjustment would fix this easily.

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&#x2F;green, had fun

The vast majority of states is not reachable, so you can roll out the full tree from the starting state and it&#x27;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&#x27;s not big, it just wouldn&#x27;t scale to larger problems.

You&#x27;d have to do that for VxVxV, because there are three different objects (although there&#x27;s some symmetry). Solving a puzzle is often described as path finding.

That&#x27;s an interesting statement. Because I actually don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s true.(Well obviously it&#x27;s not and you were joking, but let&#x27;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&#x27;s why it took so long for machines to surpass us at chess or similar. It&#x27;s a different approach. That&#x27;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).

In other words, BFS over the state space of the puzzle, skipping previously-visited states?You don&#x27;t actually gain anything by unrolling everything ahead of time; it&#x27;d actually be worse because you&#x27;d store all the memory and wouldn&#x27;t stop when you get to the solution. And you can&#x27;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&#x27;s a neglected field, not yet thawed from the last AI winter.

Hacker news change the star into italics. The variations are called &#x27;A*&#x27; and &#x27;iterative deepening A*&#x27; (Need a backslach prior to the star to show it properly)

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

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

I&#x27;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.

I&#x27;ve never come across 2 indexing. Is it meant to avoid off by one errors? Pointer arithmetic might be interesting though.

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

I actually thought 60 seconds was a bit too long. An easy to understand puzzle is probably more intuitive and &lt; 15-20 secs from start&#x2F;enough not to notice it took time.

Took me less than 60 seconds. I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s a perfect little puzzle. Next one you encounter you know the rules.I&#x27;d argue 2048 is harder to learn and that was a popular game.

It&#x27;s got too many rules for a puzzle imo. It does take an overly long time to figure out how it works.

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

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.)

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.

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

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&#x27;s curate them based on factors (joy, difficulty, visual appeal etc).Thanks for sharing. :)

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.

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

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.

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

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

That seems to be a standard bug report to me.

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

It doesn&#x27;t work. Especially on mobile.

&gt; saw that it would be necessaryFYI It&#x27;s not necessary to solve the puzzle.Also it seems to have issues on FF&#x2F;Linux because when I did stack a dog and a rabbit I could only then select the dog.

&gt; Also, the dog &#x2F; rabbit dynamic (as used in the classic dog&#x2F;duck&#x2F;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&#x27;t share a node (&quot;the dog will eat the rabbit!&quot;) 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.

Why imagine it? It is already possible :P<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;Erk-&#x2F;be3ef032d31734b6f835edd9a9685af3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;Erk-&#x2F;be3ef032d31734b6f835edd9a9685af...</a>

&gt;Can you think of a way to re formulate the puzzle so that you can express the rules without words?I&#x27;m imagining Haskell with emojis now.

&gt; 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 &quot;light up&quot; when the condition is satisfied.

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 &#x2F; rabbit dynamic (as used in the classic dog&#x2F;duck&#x2F;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!

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

I&#x27;d guess that&#x27;s just how the puzzle works.

Seems like it&#x27;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.

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.

Yes you did. One of these a day, please. I really like the hand-drawn &#x2F; doodled style.. it disarmed me, which was good because solving this required me to be patient and to unwire my brain a little

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

Very nice! Really enjoyed figuring it out :)

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

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

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.

I am completely lost. How do you play this?

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

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

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

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.

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&#x27;t like the flashing lights&#x2F;colors at all. Putting a &quot;You win&quot; or &quot;Congrats&quot; &lt;div&gt; somewhere prominent on the page is probably enough. Flashing colors is very painful on the eyes.

My epileptic partner could not handle the flashing colors

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.

&gt;&gt; It took me too long to realize characters could occupy the same spaceI solved it in under 15 minutes or so (multitasling and I didn&#x27;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&#x27;m to dumb to have tried !!* It can be solved with with a &quot;only ever one character on an intermediate non goal tile&quot; .. although that is probably a slighty longer fiddlyier way of doing things.

I&#x27;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.

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.

Can you recommend any online puzzles like this?

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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;ll probably only have to change a number in your code.

Did you manage to? I couldn&#x27;t choose the other one. (I forgot which one it was.) Even now on desktop it keeps picking up the dog and can&#x27;t choose the rabbit.

If the author is looking for ideas here, with minimal impact on the existing design, I&#x27;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 &quot;hover&quot; 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.

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.

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&#x27;t something I just randomly found.Congrats! This is really good.

Got the same.There are 200 ways of doing this (if you don&#x27;t distinguish between the 2 bunnies when they&#x27;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).<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;wrbs&#x2F;5824e9b17c55b5ad3d8467f93e12ed8b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;wrbs&#x2F;5824e9b17c55b5ad3d8467f93e12ed8...</a> (svg graph of the 4)

I think if you refuse to duplicate states you&#x27;ll get the solution pretty quickly.

&gt; I tried to fuzz this rather than use an exhaustive search.Shame. Shame. Shame. rings bell

This can be a useful approach when you have a very large number of states (as long as you also don&#x27;t revisit states). In this case, there are few enough states to just BFS the fastest way directly.

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&#x27;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.

It&#x27;s beautiful! Looks like the optimal solution is 26 steps: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;polkerty&#x2F;dog-bunny-puzzle-solver" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;polkerty&#x2F;dog-bunny-puzzle-solver</a>

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?

I tried it on two different browsers and it does exactly nothing.It&#x27;s just a diagram showing labels and lines? But nothing moves, and I don&#x27;t see any rabbits or dogs.I checked developer tools, and there are no messages.Not really sure what it&#x27;s supposed to do.

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

Something about &quot;losing&quot; a puzzle doesn&#x27;t feel right.

It isn&#x27;t stuck, you lost :) Refresh the page to try again.

Game is stuck when rabbits and dog are on ship

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

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

Exactly. That&#x27;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.

could be that you have dark reader extension enabled?

On Firefox for android when you solve it (dog at the top, both rabbits at the bottom left) nothing happens.
Other than that it&#x27;s really nice!

Doesn&#x27;t work on mobile was confused at first

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

Nice one, finished in about 20 minutes, I think it can be seen as a variation of the classical (don&#x27;t know the English name) &quot;order the numbers from 1 to 9, whith a blank space&quot;, with some extra rules.By the way, on Firefox&#x2F;Android a bunny flew away to never return when I was dragging it from the boat.

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

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

Same here. Thought the puzzle was obscure on purpose.

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

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

It&#x27;s basically a formal version of a classic sokoban game. I really like it.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s addressed to a general audience. Even figuring out that some edges are directed is not obvious if you don&#x27;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).

Very cool little game. More levels please!

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

I&#x27;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.

Very nice. But is there only one kevel or I just haven&#x27;t figured out how to move to the next after completing it?

Very fun.I also found it took a while to understand the rules, which I enjoyed, but others may not.You could add a restart button to encourage experimentation, or flash preconditions red when blocking passage to communicate rules more clearly, or start off with a simple puzzle that illustrates one rule then allow people to level up to more complex puzzles with additional rules.Nice job.

The labels as required preconditions take a moment to figure out, but I found it satisfying to do so.I&#x27;m a sucker for graph and topology puzzles, so this was very enjoyable to me. I loved that you could clearly sense progress mounting with each step.The flashing lights at the end could use a bit of calming down though.Fantastic prototype, is what this smells like : p

Great gameI agree i don&#x27;t think i have seen constraint as a game quite like this before

Nice puzzle!It would be nice to show how many steps were taken to solve it.

Feels like calculating forcing chess moves. I.e forced mates are conditional on where pieces can go and where the pieces actually are.

It looks like Hakan K (has a super cool website where he solves all kinds of optimization problems for fun) was able to solve it using the Picat language in a very small amount of code with a solution (not sure if optimal):<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hakank.org&#x2F;picat&#x2F;dogbunny_puzzle.pi" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hakank.org&#x2F;picat&#x2F;dogbunny_puzzle.pi</a>His website is a treasure trove for these kinds of problems and worth studying.

I&#x27;d love to see the formulation for this problem written out in proper form that can be fed to a solver like MiniZinc or CPLEX or whatever type of solver can handle it.

some kind of visual gate or a schematic-toggle-switch kind of thing would help

Yeah the edge with two conditions was a little confusing;(1) and(2) or(3) At bone to go up, at flower to go down [or the converse?]Was able to figure it out through experimentation, but the signage doesn&#x27;t make it obvious.

I didn&#x27;t have a problem with that edge.

This puzzle is so cool because it revolves around casual graphs in classical planning problem! One can use heuristics based search to come up with optimal solutions. I really like this innovative approach to the design.However, one edge from house to tree wasn&#x27;t clear at first because, I thought of it as logical or while it was about logical and. Other than that, pretty awesome work!!Edit:: Scrolling down the comments someone seems to already implemented a graph search. That is pretty quick: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32885309" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32885309</a>

that was a fun puzzle, are you planning on making more?

This was a fun timepass for me, i am happy to have figured oyt and solved it in less than 4 minutes.
Good job!

It would be useful to design beginner levels so that there are no states you can get into but not solve the puzzle from.I believe it&#x27;s easily possible to make puzzles where you can move into a subgroup that doesn&#x27;t include the solution. Where that&#x27;s possible you really want to solve the whole thing mentally before moving any pieces.This seems like a visualized version of the logic problems on the LSAT (and used to be on the GRE?).

I love puzzles and flashing lights. Perfect!Only counter-intuitive aspect I figured out only after finishing the first play was that animals, even dog and bunny, can occupy the same spot. But since it&#x27;s possible to finish the game without doing that (except the final move) it&#x27;s kinda moot point.

This is HN and almost nobody is talking about how this was coded.The snapping is great. The tweening is great. I guess this is uses draggable? It could have gone wrong a thousand ways but its a great success in terms of usability (I&#x27;m on mobile)in terms of the puzzle itself I found it a bit confusing, but I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;ll figure it out. it takes real initiative to just code a thing and try things out

I really enjoyed it, took me time to realize that I can put two pawns at one place.Maybe some mobile release soon?

Really enjoyed this. If this was a premium mobile game with more levels increasing in difficulty, I&#x27;d buy it for sure. Others have covered minor feedback like character icons overlapping on the same space, the flashing lights at the end, etc. So i won&#x27;t. But overall, this is exciting!

Yes! In fact, I already listed-up my future plan for refactoring the code at the readme. One of the plan is to use file I&#x2F;O to get the graph structure and the rules.I expect there would be existing solutions for (de)serializing the generic graph. One tricky thing (I think) is to encode the connection rules in some parsable format.I&#x27;m planning on extending the connection rule to propositional logic and find some fancy way to efficiently en(de)code the PL formula.Maybe I should spend some more nights to refactor my ugly code :P anyway thanks for the reply!

Cool. I see it is a solution that has the graph embedded in the code though. Any chance you could build one to work off a generic input model that describes the starting state of the characters, nodes, connections, and connection rules? That way you could run it every day without code tweeks.

Hi! I enjoyed the puzzle and I liked how puzzle itself explains every rule within itself. :)I wrote an automatic solver for the puzzle in Scala and open-sourced in GitHub. : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yusungsim&#x2F;dogbunnysolver" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yusungsim&#x2F;dogbunnysolver</a> Check it out!

Fun game, but after the seizure, do I not get another board???

Very enjoyable and well done, but not &quot;new&quot;. This effectively the same as push maze, with non contiguous rule sets.

What are the main things that cause a JS program to be compatible (or not) with clojurescript?

I have a puzzle generator in zig (tuned to be super fast at brute force graph generation)The front end is boring JavaScript, because I use react relay a lot on other projects, which is not clojurescript compatible

If this is by Conrad Barski (the Land of Lisp author), I wonder if early versions were done in Lisp and translated to JavaScript or whatever is needed for the web. Just curious how the development went.

Sweet excited for the abstract nightmares tonight where I’m asking myself about the deeper intrinsic connection between rabbits and trees and dogs and how it’s all a DAG and what do DAGs and dogs have in common besides three letters with a vowel in betweenReally stoked

This seems a bit like an extended version towers of Hanoi.

Just a static image, no animals or anything to click on, tried on Chrome 83 (no add-ons) and FF 88 (uBlock, disabled).

Having programming background, especially grinding the fizz buzz algos for fangs prep definitely helps with this puzzle.

Fair enough. Depends how you arrange your ontology. But then anything is a new type of problem, so the claim becomes meaningless.

I would argue that the visual presentation and interface is a big part of what makes a puzzle, and changes how it is perceived, and therefore it is a new type of puzzle.

The state I’m referring to is is the whole puzzle state. It’s a confusing term in this case.

The graph drawn here is different from the graph of states: the latter has the cube of the number of these graph nodes, and several edges per node, and would be difficult to draw clearly on a flat paper.

Hmmm. We’ll, in CS it’s problem solving: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pearsonhighered.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;samplechapter&#x2F;0&#x2F;1&#x2F;3&#x2F;6&#x2F;0136042597.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pearsonhighered.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;samplechapter&#x2F;0&#x2F;1&#x2F;3&#x2F;6...</a>You’d think that it would be part of game theory, but all the game theory I’ve seen deals with multiplayer games, but it seems like a cooperative total information n-player game is essentially the same as a one player puzzle. So maybe g.t. generalizes in this way.

is there a branch of mathematics that formally models this isomorphic forms of this stuff? topology? or just plain old graph theory

Fun implementation. It’s isomorphic to a wide range of problems that have been used for centuries that are all isomorphic to constrained state search. The fact that the graph is explicit here  makes the problem way easier. (One you may be familiar with that seems very similar is the parking problem where by sliding around the cars they (un)block one another. None of this is to take away from the fun setting and implementation. Just that it’s not a new type of problem, although it seems to be a fun new instance of a common type of problem.

Don&#x27;t rock the boat, baby!
Don&#x27;t tip the boat over!

Break? That&#x27;s just a failure condition as per rules, working as intended

Fun! Though I managed to break the game by placing all on the boat :)

There is a tiny bug, when you release and click fast you can drop anywhere.

Where you inspired by Alcuin numbers[0]?[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZCVAGb1ee8A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZCVAGb1ee8A</a>

I didn&#x27;t see one either until I turned off my dark mode browser extension. If you also use an extension that modifies stylesheets, you might want to try disabling it for this site.

That was fun but I didn&#x27;t see any reward effect at all.

She&#x27;s a genius[1]. Took me an age to figure out what the rules were and then a fair while to actually get it done.[1]Well compared to me anyway

I’m 45 years old and have been staring at it for a very long time without a clue. First off, you’ve raised a wonderful 8 year old and deserve congratulations.Second, is she available for lessons?? :)

My 9 year old got it in about 3 minutes, but only after I told him to slow down and read everything on the page.He started with furious swiping right off the bat. I started by reading everything and thinking through moves in my head without even trying to swipe.I think we ended up solving it in about the same amount of time. Interesting that the rapid iteration method and the measured thoughtful method yielded similar results.

My 5yo also enjoyed the puzzle and was excited when he finally figure it out.The one issue he had was whenever he&#x27;d try to move a rabbit from boat to house, he&#x27;d accidentally trigger the browser back function because he was starting too close to the edge of the screen. Then the puzzle would be reset when he navigated back to the page.This caused a lot of frustration because he could be careful when he was thinking about it, but then he&#x27;d get absorbed in the puzzle and forget to swipe carefully.

&gt; May be an animation showing what is possible will help here.Now I&#x27;m imagining a version where the animals get antsy and start hopping around on their own if you take too long to make a move.

Thank you.. As fun as it was to solve the simple puzzle, nothing will replace the joy I felt when I showed it to my 8 year old daughter to see her solve it in 2 minutes flat with no instruction at all. Thank you for making it possible. I had to ask her to persist for a bit as she didn&#x27;t exactly see what had to be done. She knew what had to be done once she accidentally swiped and saw to rabbit get dragged along. May be an animation showing what is possible will help here.

I liked the insanely rapidly flashing colors.

Another quick reward effect you could do to avoid flashing colors is to make the animals jump up and down, as if they’re happy to get their food

Works on my iPad Air 2 on iOS 15.6.1 and Chrome.

Just FYI, the page doesn’t work on iPad&#x2F;iOS 14.x Safari, no animals to be seen, just the static graph.

Thanks for your wonderful books. You have been an inspiration.

Oh. I solved it by following the arrows, didn’t know I could go the other way.

Funnily enough I understood all the rules, but still was mentally blocked for a while because I just didn&#x27;t even consider moving back from the flower as a possibility. I guess there was something about that arrow that was very enticing.

I thought there was no solution because I thought the arrow pointing on the line from the flower meant you could only go that direction from the flower, but the solution relies on someone behind able to move backwards from the flower.Granted there is the blue feedback if you are on the flower, but it’s confusing when you are trying to plan ahead.edit: Fun puzzle though!

It didn&#x27;t work for me on my computer, but I grasped the concept well enough to see that it would be quite enjoyable. Since the purpose of the MVP is to get people interested, I call it a success.

I don’t have epilepsy, even though, that’s quite an intense flashing image.

I would prefer if that was not &quot;auto&quot; marked in that way, it felt nicer to try to think about each crossing. Perhaps something that could be turned on and off.

All these suggestions are great and &quot;make sense&quot;. And all of them would dramatically simplify the game and remove the challenge. The puzzle IS the trial and error.Perfect illustration of how hard game design is.

Nice puzzle: Was able to complete it after some trial &amp; error.Suggestions:- Mark uncrossable paths with (an &#x27;X&#x27; in the middle of the line) OR (red) to make it clearer that the path cannot be currently crossed.- Mark paths with fulfilled conditions (as green OR with the &#x27;X&#x27; removed)- Mark fulfilled conditions with (a tick symbol OR green) and unmet flags with (a cross (&#x27;X&#x27;) OR red) to make the fulfillment state of conditions obvious.(edits because I can&#x27;t use emojis in HN comments.)

(author here)Great feedback! Yes, I am the &quot;Land of Lisp&quot; guySorry about the potential epilepsy trigger- that was the fastest way I could think of to code a quick &quot;reward effect&quot;, I will do something different in the next version. I didn&#x27;t really expect anyone to care enough to solve the puzzle lol.Now that I know people like the puzzle, I will build out the website and post regular puzzles, follow my Twitter @lisperati for updates.

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