How fantastic is your contraption?

http://fantasticcontraption.com/

This game is great but it's making me feel like a complete idiot. First level, Mind the Gap, and I was stuck for like 5mns because of that gap! But enjoyable game nonetheless

haha mind the gap is easy
http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2279990

OK THAT IS FUCKING AMAZING AND AWESOME!!!!
How much time did you spend building that fantastic contraption btw (if it is yours)? I'm basically an adept of "MOER WHEELS". Didnt work with 4, put 6 and that'll show it

that one took a while! sometimes it's frustrating, there was one level (the tube) that i spent maybe 2 hours getting to a solution involving like about 18 wheels, when i finally finished and can see other people's answers they did it with 2 wheels and a stick! grr!

Oh you can see other people's answers once you clear a level? I didnt realise that. Do you have to sign in for that? Anyways, your contraption for mind the gap was surely greater than mine, but mine was clearly easier to build :)

yeah once you've cleared the level there will be an option for "see other's designs" in the menu for that level. some are genius.

you can actually do mind the gap with no wheels!!
http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2363603

opening a second window gives the background music a wonderful philip glass feel

OK, I love this. But viewing other people's contraptions made me feel like a poor contraptionist. I mean, that football thing of yours rules.
And all sorts of simple but really cool ideas like this: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2356030

Ok that no wheel is genius yet so simple. I hate you though cause I'm not going to get any work done by your fault. Not only is it great to build fantastic contraptions, it's also a load of fun to see other people's contraptions. I love tanks and catapults as contraptions yet I cant seem to build a proper one. I am an idiot seems to be the conclusion but I keep on playing anyway!

Everyting I make it pyramids with wheels, sometimes with other pyramids on top etc.
Someone made a pyramid that uses smaller pyramids as, err, metawheels or something. Kicked ass. Looked like some monstrous tank thing.

Watching other people's contraptions gives good ideas. I build bridges now to clear gaps and life besomes so easy. But yeah, I'm awed by what some people manage to do.

Whenever I try to make something fancy, it becomes some gibbering Cronenberg monster. I'm scared. Man wasn't meant to play god like this!

Best thing about the 1 stick is that the stick disappears from view JUST as the wheel enters the goal.

thankfully, from the sounds of things, this is blocked on my works internet

link us some of your contraptions guys!

(xpost yeah ste i stayed up all night playing this when i first saw it.. work next day wasn't pleasant)

poppage http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2364209

horrendous! i prefer simplicity: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2364290

That "Around The Bend" level is piss-easy: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2364313

OMG POPPAGE

more 1 stick fun around the bend http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2364472

(liked yours though LJ! smart!)

haha i see someone managed with no sticks no nothing http://fantasticcontraption.com/?designId=2364313

OH MY FUCKING GOD I had a glance at "other peoples' designs" and SOMEONE HAS WON THE GAME: http://fantasticcontraption.com/?designId=2364472

you linked the wrong one i think!

Haha, then there are people like me who clearly don't know a thing about subtle design...
http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2364656

I made some really great designs for that level, only problem was that, err... they never got that pink cube to the exit.

as did you, ken!

Here's the one I meant (you gotta use the "link to this" box): http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2359153

^^^genuinely ftw, i mean how do they think these things up

Holy mother of mechagod, what the hell! That's astounding.

holy shit!!

my friend made this one. http://fantasticcontraption.com/?designId=2016718

LOL what a shame it falls over at the end

omg that is incredible. so maybe i'm violating the spirit with my easy wins: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2365122

i kind of like that it carries on crawling!

seeing how that scenic route one started I half expected the ball to be thrown back the other way instead of rolling to the pink zone there. I did this one the exact opposite way ie not using a single object.

xpost i think simple ones are great actually!

(this was the one i meant to link http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2356856)

i modified my striker and now it does something beautiful (but um, wrong way)
http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2284709

xpost thats exactly what I did!

get it to bounce off something thrown up from the left-hand side of the start area, and I'll be impressed xpost

and that way wrong is terribly stylish... and amazing if it werent for the fact that wel wrong way lol :D

Also, the bit of ground you start off upon in "mind the gap" is EXCEPTIONALLY phallic

I'm too old for this shit.

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2365291
I like the idea of having separate objects working together to get shit done. But y'know, that scenic route one can't be beaten.

added some more shit to get it to go to the goal (+ an extra 'goal')

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2365610

ken i love you

played a bit at lunchtime, seems ace. only got to Full Up.

genuine lols, ken.

craptank - takes three minutes to climb the stairs: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2366156

now that's a tank: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2364387

teh cuet! i spent quite a while warming-down looking at other user's solutions. there are some maddeningly simple ones (eg for back and forth). the over complex ones are charming too.

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2613234

yeah! one the works, and it has 2 parts!!

he he heh

http://fantasticcontraption.com/?designId=2613757

holy shit it took me two days to figure out how to do level "Awash"

awash = cut out the middle man http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2620531

OMG I have made a stylin' one I am pleased with!

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2644188

Still trying to make the 'scoop' approach work on "Four Balls" - this one breaks down, but apparently sends one ball into orbit. It should fall eventually, right?

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2661462

For me it goes up once, comes down, and then gets flipped up a second time. If you zoom all the way out, you can see that it disappears completely off the screen then, and I think that means it's lost permanently.

I like the design though - pity it glitches out and explodes.

yeah, it's the second launch I meant. I have some other slightly more successful versions of the same design. One worked when I saved it! Then didn't when I loaded it. ;_;

i'll prob never top my last one but i'm proud of all my children http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2663430

The "Success" Scoop

http://fantasticcontraption.com/?designId=2598579

Well hell, now it works again! Browser differences maybe. I have Chrome here, and IE at work where it blew it.

My unpossible: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2669485

ugly and it took me the entire day, but hey, it worked!

lol and U-Turn took me 20 minutes: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2669485

oops: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2670462

lol managed to get lots of people seriously addicted to this, including apparently the butler of a multi-millionaire crackpot

Perhaps the crackpot will try and build these machines in real life?

...which would be awesome if the crackpot turned out to be Dyson.

evidence for potential awesomeness...

huh?

I'm just saying that if you wanted to do this in real life, Dyson would be the person to go to.

anyone do this one like this? http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=4323194

prob everyone, pretty nifty tho

I am TERRIBLE at this. I've made it, somehow, to Mission to Mars, but completely uncreatively as I didn't realise you could connect sticks to sticks and water to water. I only just realised I can move the starting position of the pink ball.

For people who want more of the same(ish) there's "Phun"
http://www.phunland.com/wiki/Home
...a bit like a more complex version of FC but with no goals.

I need goals or I lose interest rather quickly.
I've moved on to http://projecteuler.net/

also manages to be nowhere near as intuitive as FC, and somehow not 'phun' at all.

xp, aye with no goal it's pretty pointless.

Project Euler looks like fun. what are you using to program in - assuming you're not working it all out on paper?

I'm kind of using PE to teach myself Python 3. I figured it'd be a nice way to get used to a new language. Also, the Python command line is really quite grand for this sort of thing. I mostly do Java and PHP all day at work, so I figured it would be nice to use something else for this.
Sort of wondering if I should try Haskell though. I did a little bit of Standard ML some years back and it was a LOT of fun. Plus, half my solutions so far have been recursive anyways.

Just done #1 (brute force, in my shaky and ill-remembered C), then looked at some of the other solutions. particularly like this one in K:

+/&|/~(!1000)!/:3 5

and Haskell appears to make it too easy:

sum [3,6..999] + sum [5,10..999] - sum [15,30..999]

Hah, yes, my solutions so far have been pretty inelegant. I'm not much of a math-whiz, so it's really cool to get access to the forum afterwards to see the sort of stuff some of those very clever people come up with. I dig it when people rewrite something into a really elegant mathematical formula that you could quickly solve by hand.

For better or worse, once you get past the first few problems, brute force becomes close to useless, since it'll take too long.

wtf@K. I'd never even heard of that language. Reminds me of those dreadful "Just another Perl hacker" signatures from the Usenet days.

Oh, I *love* project euler. I am gpallis on there, I haven't been on for ages though. Who are y'all?

I have never seen any solutions in which the J/K solution has been longer than 15 characters, it's kind of mind blowing.

I didn't even realise there was a new python? I read the doc but I can't work out what is new that I'll actually use, other than the fractions module and print being different.

I've not read up on the new Python stuff, since I'm basically a new user and figure I might as well go with the latest version, but I'm kinda amazed that it's not backwards-compatible, even if there's a tool that can upgrade your old code.

Huh, J is... curious. http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Studio
I wonder how long it takes for someone to become "fluent" in it.

I'm oysteinh-o on PE.

J looks like catnip for the code golf ("show off your code-fu by trying to solve coding problems using the least number of keystrokes") types. I spent a while looking at a Perl golf site thinking it might be good for me and never came close to understanding any of the solutions.

Did some Haskell at university (some time ago, so my opinions on it may be outdated or just plain wrong) and still often find myself thinking "this would be a lot easier in Haskell" but am too lazy and undisciplined to think about types with sufficient rigour to go back to it. If you're happy with ML you'll probably be fairly comfortable, except I think ML lets you dip out of pure functional programming into procedural programming when convenient, which may be a shortcut you'll miss.

And I'm guessing the Haskell solutions may be conceptually neat but you can probably get yourself at least a cup of tea and possibly order and receive a pizza in the time they take to return any results.

I did the first 3 or so PE problems a while ago without signing up. Are there advantages to signing up? I'm not exactly going to produce anything elite enough to be posted on the forums.

The two main advantages are that you can check your answers, and that you get the chance to see other people's thoughts and solutions about the problems once you've solved them. I don't see myself posting anything there any time soon either.

Yeah - the forum threads are worth reading even code-fu aside, often people use some rly elegant maths to cut through stuff.

Some of the later ones, like with the circular mirrors, I look at and just have no idea how any human could begin to think about them.

that phun thing is basically poor man's version of little big planet?

Using Python almost feels like cheating on some of these early ones, as it seems to have no trouble handling large numbers. Finding the first 1000-digit number in the Fibonacci-series was no greater work than, y'know, calculating the whole damn series up to that point. Not very elegant, I admit.

how does that site work? where do you put in your program?

You just enter the output from your program, not the program itself.

oh right

i thought it was like a parser or something

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2499098

This didn't work before I saved it.

A quicker version

My version of Back and Forth:
http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2646703

for a few days this was the most important thing in the world. Kind of scared to get into it again tbh.

deserves a revival, tho perhaps 5:30 in the morning isn't the time to do it. this one of mine: http://fantasticcontraption.com/?designId=2380761 still makes me kinda sad. such a hopeless creature.