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The back wall of this fishtank is a touch-sensitive monitor. On the monitor is a scrambled picture. Perhaps a favorite photo, or a famous castle, or your football team's logo.
The scrambling is in squares, like those square-shifting puzzles. As with these puzzles, there is one open square (no picture
portion). Each time a fish contacts one of the squares adjacent to the open square, the contacted picture square is moved into the open spot, clearing the current spot. When a square is moved to its proper place for the unscrambled picture, it is locked in place and no more fishy-touching will move it.
How long will it take your genius fish to complete the puzzle?
Hours - nay, weeks - of fish tank fun.
[link]
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Pieces not in the right place could get caged in by locked pieces. There could be an exception to correct that. It would require more time on average for the fish to complete the puzzle.
Corners could be locked in more permanently. |
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my fish got cancer. thanks a lot. |
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The final picture resolves to a big, nasty pike on the attack and promptly scares poor fishy to death. |
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[jscott] good point. Let's see... we could take care of that by allowing any locked-in piece to switch on contact with the proper piece for the square. How's that sound? |
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You mean a switch that doesn't follow the rules? How about pieces only locking in that wouldn't lock in pieces in the wrong place? |
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That could still cause problems. |
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Imagine an NxN puzzle with the first N-1 rows completed, the final row jumbled. None of the final N-1 pieces are technically locked, since they can all slide within their row. However you need to be able to 'invade' the row above in order to shuffle the pieces of the final row into their correct order. |
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It should be possible (straightforward?) to instead allow locking to occur in phases, still allowing sufficient flexibility for the remaining pieces. |
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That's the solution, [boysparks]. You do not lock if you would be locking out the solution. That is simple. |
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If you could somehow show the fish a different photo that couldn't be seen by the casual observer, the fish could be encouraged to hit appropriate squares. For example, Male Siam fighting fish would try to bite a competitive male. |
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