Douglas R. Hofstadter, Martin Gardner, Von Neumann. There are some minds that you cannot but helplessly admire. For admire - admiration, is exuded from them like a natural aura. These people find fascination in the insatiable and their ability to coax the beauty from something even as desperate as a a cornflake is insatiable. A trend with creative thinkers seems to be the addiction of designing puzzles and games to describe a concept. In trying to understand their minds I have decided to motivate myself to adopt their mindset. Here I try to design my first puzzle.
Puzzle design, I have decided, is harder than solving puzzle. I claim no expertise on the knowledge of puzzles, nor have I ever strived to master SoDoKu, KenKen, Crosswords, or the like, but trying to invent your own puzzle is like trying to flavour a meal according to someone else’s tastes: you need them to sample along the way. The puzzle I have desiged below is nothing complicated. But SoDoKu is quite unimaginative. A puzzle is not made by the unfathomable complexity and wonder by how many twists and whistles it can present, but instead by how constrained it makes the solver. The most devious puzzle is the puzzle where a single move solves the riddle, like the drawing of two faces that with a nudge in perspective flashes into a drawing of a vase. A solver develops a repotoir of tricks that are common for a certain puzzle and it is up to the puzzler (one who designs puzzles) to see to it that this repotoir is updated carefully. For example, when I am ‘solving’ a minesweeper puzzle, I know that a 3 in a corneris certain knowledge of 3 bombs - it may seem intuitive once you know the game, but allowing the solver to build that intuition is a craft.
Enough with the dwelling of puzzle design theory and on with the puzzle.
Instructions: To understand Chronon, begin with the image in your mind of water flowing through pipes. These pipes are connected to ‘reservoir’ points where multiple water flows can meet. The reservoirs function like a dynamic dam: if enough water from the pipes has entered, the water is allowed to continue to flow, otherwise the water is halted. When the water is allowed to flow, the dam lights up!
To help you visualise this, let’s start with a simple layout of a Chronon puzzle:
In the above puzzle, the blue circle is the source, where the water will first flow from. The red circles are reservoirs where the water pipes meet. A water pipe is a black line connecting any two circles. Note how the black line has an arrow pointing which way the water flows.
Now, for water to flow through a reservoir, it must have at least two sources of water coming into it. A circle can have two pipes leaving it as well as one pipe. One pipes are represented by a thick pipe. Below is an example of water not able to flow because two sources of water do not enter the 3rd circle at the top channel. Because only one channel continues, the final node does get water to it.
By now, you have probably deduced that the water flow cannot be seen, but the reservoirs light up green when the water has entered them. Also, water only flows once. That is, it leaves the source in a clump and that is all the water we get. Think of turning the tap on for a bit and then turning it off and using only the water that fell while it was on. All this is natural in the world of Chronon and will gradually become natural to you.
There is one more type of circle I have not discussed, the goal circle which is coloured orange. What’s the number on the goal circle? The number tells you at what time we need the water to enter the goal. If a goal says 7, that means at exactly time 7 the water must enter the goal. Not 6, nor 8; 9 is right out. What makes our puzzle different from the puzzles found in newspaper inserts or in advanced puzzle books is that our puzzles move - they use time. A special form of time called ticks. Every tick, that is the time changes from 0 to 1 or 36 to 37 or whatever, the water moves, instantaneously, down any pipe connected to its reservoir. There is a tick counter at the bottom left of every puzzle indicating this to you.
Now, it is time for you to build. The controls for operating the construction of puzzles is rather unimpressive (a redesign may be in order in the future). The button labelled RUN will start the water flowing from the source. Click it again to stop reset the water back to the start. The button labelled | can be clicked once to make it || and clicked again to go back to |. When it is | a single pipe is placed between two circles. When it is labelled || two pipes are placed. To place a pipe, simply select a circle by clicking it, and then select the destination circle. There are some limits as to which pipes can be placed where. For example, puzzles will have pre-placed pipes in some locations, you cannot place over these pipes, or edit their configuration. Have a practise placing one pipe (remember |) below:
Now solve the below puzzle by placing two pipes (remember first set the pipe button to: ||).
I dare you to try and solve the above puzzle placing only single pipes.
Congratulations, you’ve actually solved the first of the four puzzles I have designed for this introduction to Chronon.
One final thing to discuss. Loops. Loops are quintessential in Chronon. In fact, they are the reason Chronon does anything interesting in the first place. Below are some examples of loops of different sizes. A serious hint: all puzzles below use a loop or two. Perhaps it might help you to study the connections below carefully.
Below you will find three more puzzles of incrementing difficult. Only the first two are really intended to be solved. In Chronon we don’t treat the puzzle world with the graduation you see in modern video games. A Doom approach is preferred: each puzzle is a unique challenge that requires lateral thinking. No two puzzles address similar concepts. Hence, my collection of puzzles is currently rather light as it takes time to develop interesting mechanics.
Puzzle: Easy. The second of the four puzzles is intended to make the solver comfortable with loops. The trick to Chronon is master loops, hence the simplest puzzle should be one that posesses just one loop. Our brainss can easily handle one loop: 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,… what’s next?
Puzzle: Medium. Hopefully you have mastered the loop. This next puzzle is a quantum leap in comparison.
Puzzle: Hard. Let it be known if you solve this puzzle without permuting all possible connections, I will be thoroughly impressed.
So far I have treated you to just two-loopers. The next set of puzzles that are being devised involve three-loops and the introduction of anti-flow connections. Interestingly, by adding an anti-flow connection, we can now perform compuation with these puzzles. For example we can start modelling simple circuits that can add, subtract, and do logic. More on this next time.
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The graphic at the top of this post: “A Puzzle Game Named Chronon” via VQGAN+CLIP.