Escape Level : "Turing Machine" by mjn

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"Turing Machine" by mjn

added 07 Apr 2005 22:23

Solved 57/57

Cooked 1/57

Difficulty 1.66

Style 5.71

Rigidity 7.73

Shortest Solution
Name Original

Length 1875 moves

By mjn

On 07 Apr 2005 22:23

Comments (turn spoilers off)

5717 Turing Machine Citron (928) Fri 24 Mar 2006 11:28

Where am I, where do I go, I don't even known who I am when I go out of this machine...

1693 Turing Machine mjn (96) Fri 08 Apr 2005 10:09 SPOILER

Yeah, it's a shame about some of those teleports; I did want to keep it (relatively) small, though.

Perhaps it's a little hard to see, with the gigantic size and all, but almost all of the teleports are predictable, and you can actually observe two-thirds of the program without knowing where any of the teleports go--the green and blue switch blocks in the state area are used to indicate 0/1 (for writing) and L/R, respectively.

(Not that that helps a player who doesn't know how TMs work, I guess...)

I'm glad I resisted the temptation to program this with a busy beaver function, though.

1691 Turing Machine Tom 7 (1) Fri 08 Apr 2005 09:33 SPOILER

Given that my solution was 1877 moves and yours was 1875, I'd say this is pretty damn tight.

This is a cool encoding! Although the level is totally easy (turing machines aren't "games" so this isn't a surprise) and kind of repetetive, it does give you time to study what's happening. There are two things that are unfortunate: (1) the tape is finite, so this isn't really a turing machine (but it's clearly not possible to code up any infinite storage in Escape played on a finite map, and probably not possible even on an infinite grid, because of conservation of matter)--it's sort of a turing finite automata. But still, it's easy to see how to generalize to arbitrarily long tape. (2) Because the machine's program is encoded in the destinations of teleports, it makes the "interesting" part of the level essentially hidden from the player. I don't know how you could have gotten around this without making the level much bigger, though.

Anyway, cool!

1686 Turing Machine Joshua Bone (257) Thu 07 Apr 2005 22:55 SPOILER

As a technological demonstration this is an incredible feat of engineering. The mechanisms all appear to work perfectly. Aside from a triple choice of teleports at the beginning, there does not seem to be any other possible path to take except for the solution route. Extremely tight.

1685 Turing Machine mjn (118) Thu 07 Apr 2005 22:28

From the embedding department: a Turing Machine.

Tape, tape heads, and "motor" on the left; state memory and transition function on the right. This particular machine (which I stole from the Wikipedia article) duplicates a series of 1's. (Solution's a little long, unfortunately, but I thought it'd be nice to have a machine that actually does something, rather than putter around for a few steps and stop abruptly.)

(I'd recommend playing this zoomed-out.)

1684 Turing Machine mjn (118) Thu 07 Apr 2005 22:23

'Turing Machine' uploaded by mjn.

Comments (turn spoilers off)

5717	Turing Machine	Citron (928)	Fri 24 Mar 2006 11:28
	Where am I, where do I go, I don't even known who I am when I go out of this machine...

1693	Turing Machine	mjn (96)	Fri 08 Apr 2005 10:09	SPOILER
	Yeah, it's a shame about some of those teleports; I did want to keep it (relatively) small, though. Perhaps it's a little hard to see, with the gigantic size and all, but almost all of the teleports are predictable, and you can actually observe two-thirds of the program without knowing where any of the teleports go--the green and blue switch blocks in the state area are used to indicate 0/1 (for writing) and L/R, respectively. (Not that that helps a player who doesn't know how TMs work, I guess...) I'm glad I resisted the temptation to program this with a busy beaver function, though.

1691	Turing Machine	Tom 7 (1)	Fri 08 Apr 2005 09:33	SPOILER
	Given that my solution was 1877 moves and yours was 1875, I'd say this is pretty damn tight. This is a cool encoding! Although the level is totally easy (turing machines aren't "games" so this isn't a surprise) and kind of repetetive, it does give you time to study what's happening. There are two things that are unfortunate: (1) the tape is finite, so this isn't really a turing machine (but it's clearly not possible to code up any infinite storage in Escape played on a finite map, and probably not possible even on an infinite grid, because of conservation of matter)--it's sort of a turing finite automata. But still, it's easy to see how to generalize to arbitrarily long tape. (2) Because the machine's program is encoded in the destinations of teleports, it makes the "interesting" part of the level essentially hidden from the player. I don't know how you could have gotten around this without making the level much bigger, though. Anyway, cool!

1686	Turing Machine	Joshua Bone (257)	Thu 07 Apr 2005 22:55	SPOILER
	As a technological demonstration this is an incredible feat of engineering. The mechanisms all appear to work perfectly. Aside from a triple choice of teleports at the beginning, there does not seem to be any other possible path to take except for the solution route. Extremely tight.

1685	Turing Machine	mjn (118)	Thu 07 Apr 2005 22:28
	From the embedding department: a Turing Machine. Tape, tape heads, and "motor" on the left; state memory and transition function on the right. This particular machine (which I stole from the Wikipedia article) duplicates a series of 1's. (Solution's a little long, unfortunately, but I thought it'd be nice to have a machine that actually does something, rather than putter around for a few steps and stop abruptly.) (I'd recommend playing this zoomed-out.)

1684	Turing Machine	mjn (118)	Thu 07 Apr 2005 22:23
	'Turing Machine' uploaded by mjn.