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1. Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2019 12:38:33 EST Verius
   Playing an old adventure game. Logic gate puzzle, expert level. Four binary input wires, construct a chip to handle them. I notice pretty straight away that the D line goes 0 1 0 1 0 1 except that it switches in the middle of the logic table. So I look and it's pretty obvious that only the A and D lines are in any way significant and that if A = 0 the result is equal to D and that if A = 1 the result is equal to not(D). So I throw in an XOR and yup, the puzzle is solved. Define expert level. (The odd thing is, the game game gives you actually an actually difficult puzzle in the math section where you have to fill a grid of numbers to get specific sums (a variation on magic squares).)
   1. Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2019 12:41:11 EST Verius

      in reply to
      I guess the lesson is that I'm more suited to deterministic than non-deterministic puzzle solving. Though I have a way to convert the latter into the former: writing a prolog / finite domain constraint logic program to solve the puzzle for me. Seriously, Prolog is like the best language ever when you need lots of backtracking, it beats even politicians.