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THE ART of Puzzle Game Design
THE ART OF Puzzle Design Scott Kim & Alexey Pajitnov with Bob Bates, Gary Rosenzweig, Michael Wyman March 8, 2000 Game Developers Conference These are presentation slides from an all-day tutorial given at the 2000 Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California (www.gdconf.com). After the conference, the slides will be available at www.scottkim.com. Puzzles Part of many games. Adventure, education, action, web But how do you create them? Puzzles are an important part of many computer games. Cartridge-based action puzzle gamse, CD-ROM puzzle anthologies, adventure game, and educational game all need good puzzles. Good News / Bad News Mental challenge Marketable? Nonviolent Dramatic? Easy to program Hard to invent? Growing market Small market? The good news is that puzzles appeal widely to both males and females of all ages. Although the market is small, it is rapidly expanding, as computers become a mass market commodity and the internet shifts computer games toward familiar, quick, easy-to-learn games. Outline MORNING AFTERNOON What is a puzzle? Guest Speakers Examples Exercise Case studies Question & Design process Answer We’ll start by discussing genres of puzzle games. We’ll study some classic puzzle games, and current projects. We’ll cover the eight steps of the puzzle design process. We’ll hear from guest speakers. Finally we’ll do hands-on projects, with time for question and answer. What is a Puzzle? Five ways of defining puzzle games First, let’s map out the basic genres of puzzle games. Scott Kim 1. Definition of “Puzzle” A puzzle is fun and has a right answer. -
Solving Pictorial Jigsaw Puzzle by Stigmergy-Inspired Internet-Based Human Collective Intelligence
Solving Pictorial Jigsaw Puzzle by Stigmergy-inspired Internet-based Human Collective Intelligence Bo Shen Wei Zhang Haiyan Zhao Peking University, Beijing, China Peking University, Beijing, China Peking University, Beijing, China Beijing, China Beijing, China Beijing, China [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Zhi Jin Yanhong Wu Peking University, Beijing, China Peking University, Beijing, China Beijing, China Beijing, China [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION The pictorial jigsaw (PJ) puzzle is a well-known leisure game for hu- Pictorial jigsaw (PJ) puzzle is a well-known leisure game for people mans. Usually, a PJ puzzle game is played by one or several human from children to adults. In a PJ puzzle game, the goal is to recover an players face-to-face in the physical space. In this paper, we focus on image with human-sensitive contents from n different pieces of the how to solve PJ puzzles in the cyberspace by a group of physically image, as fast as possible. Besides the appearance of a leisure game, distributed human players. We propose an approach to solving PJ PJ puzzle has a deep metaphorical meaning. It embodies perfectly puzzle by stigmergy-inspired Internet-based human collective intel- a kind of complex problems that can not be resolved in a top-down ligence. The core of the approach is a continuously executing loop, manner, but only in a bottom-up, exploring and growing manner. named the EIF loop, which consists of three activities: exploration, That is, such a problem usually can not be pre-decomposed into a integration, and feedback. -
Algorithmic Combinatorial Game Theory∗
Playing Games with Algorithms: Algorithmic Combinatorial Game Theory∗ Erik D. Demaine† Robert A. Hearn‡ Abstract Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we begin with general background in Combinatorial Game Theory, which analyzes ideal play in perfect-information games, and Constraint Logic, which provides a framework for showing hardness. Then we survey results about the complexity of determining ideal play in these games, and the related problems of solving puzzles, in terms of both polynomial-time algorithms and computational intractability results. Our review of background and survey of algorithmic results are by no means complete, but should serve as a useful primer. 1 Introduction Many classic games are known to be computationally intractable (assuming P 6= NP): one-player puzzles are often NP-complete (as in Minesweeper) or PSPACE-complete (as in Rush Hour), and two-player games are often PSPACE-complete (as in Othello) or EXPTIME-complete (as in Check- ers, Chess, and Go). Surprisingly, many seemingly simple puzzles and games are also hard. Other results are positive, proving that some games can be played optimally in polynomial time. In some cases, particularly with one-player puzzles, the computationally tractable games are still interesting for humans to play. We begin by reviewing some basics of Combinatorial Game Theory in Section 2, which gives tools for designing algorithms, followed by reviewing the relatively new theory of Constraint Logic in Section 3, which gives tools for proving hardness. -
History and Current State of Recreational Mathematics and Its Relation to Serious Mathematics
Charles University in Prague Faculty of Mathematics and Physics DOCTORAL THESIS Tereza B´artlov´a History and current state of recreational mathematics and its relation to serious mathematics Department of Mathematical Analysis Supervisor of the doctoral thesis: prof. RNDr. LuboˇsPick, CSc., DSc. Study programme: Mathematics Study branch: General Questions of Mathematics and Information Science Prague 2016 I declare that I carried out this doctoral thesis independently, and only with the cited sources, literature and other professional sources. I understand that my work relates to the rights and obligations under the Act No. 121/2000 Sb., the Copyright Act, as amended, in particular the fact that the Charles University in Prague has the right to conclude a license agreement on the use of this work as a school work pursuant to Section 60 subsection 1 of the Copyright Act. In Prague on June 28, 2016 Tereza B´artlov´a i Title: History and current state of recreational mathematics and its relation to serious mathematics Author: Tereza B´artlov´a Department: Department of Mathematical Analysis Supervisor: prof. RNDr. LuboˇsPick, CSc., DSc., Department of Mathematical Analysis Abstract: The present thesis is devoted to the study of recreational mathematics, with a particular emphasis on its history, its relation to serious mathematics and its educational benefits. The thesis consists of five papers. In the first one we investigate the history of recreational mathematics. We focus on the development of mathematical problems throughout history, and we try to point out the people who had an important influence on the progress of recreational mathematics. The second article is dedicated to Edwin Abbott Abbott and his book called Flatland. -
Jigsaw Puzzles, Edge Matching, and Polyomino Packing: Connections and Complexity∗
Jigsaw Puzzles, Edge Matching, and Polyomino Packing: Connections and Complexity∗ Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 32 Vassar St., Cambridge, MA 02139, USA, {edemaine,mdemaine}@mit.edu Dedicated to Jin Akiyama in honor of his 60th birthday. Abstract. We show that jigsaw puzzles, edge-matching puzzles, and polyomino packing puzzles are all NP-complete. Furthermore, we show direct equivalences between these three types of puzzles: any puzzle of one type can be converted into an equivalent puzzle of any other type. 1. Introduction Jigsaw puzzles [37,38] are perhaps the most popular form of puzzle. The original jigsaw puzzles of the 1760s were cut from wood sheets using a hand woodworking tool called a jig saw, which is where the puzzles get their name. The images on the puzzles were European maps, and the jigsaw puzzles were used as educational toys, an idea still used in some schools today. Handmade wooden jigsaw puzzles for adults took off around 1900. Today, jigsaw puzzles are usually cut from cardboard with a die, a technology that became practical in the 1930s. Nonetheless, true addicts can still find craftsmen who hand-make wooden jigsaw puzzles. Most jigsaw puzzles have a guiding image and each side of a piece has only one “mate”, although a few harder variations have blank pieces and/or pieces with ambiguous mates. Edge-matching puzzles [21] are another popular puzzle with a similar spirit to jigsaw puzzles, first appearing in the 1890s. In an edge-matching puzzle, the goal is to arrange a given collection of several identically shaped but differently patterned tiles (typically squares) so that the patterns match up along the edges of adjacent tiles. -
ARTICLE Usage Requests to the ALA Office of Rights and Permissions
All materials in this journal subject to copyright by the American Library Association may be used for the noncommercial purpose of scientific or educational advancement granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976. Address ARTICLE usage requests to the ALA Office of Rights and Permissions. The Clock Is Ticking: Library Orientation as Puzzle Room 48 Knowledge Quest | Preservice School Librarian Voices All materials in this journal subject to copyright by the American Library Association may be used for the noncommercial purpose of scientific or educational advancement granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976. Address usage requests to the ALA Office of Rights and Permissions. Tripp Reade [email protected] retend for a moment you’re in ing characteristics of the escape room ink—each of which contributes to Pninth grade, two weeks into variant known as a puzzle room: the the story. They differ from escape high school and visiting the library clock, the clue, the narrative. (Film rooms in objective: not literal escape with your classmates for orientation. buffs might additionally recognize but some other victory condition, The library staff tells you and your in the thief’s M.O. a reference to stipulated within the narrative. The team of detectives—yes, they call you one of the plot twists in The Thomas objective might be solving a murder, detectives—that a priceless statuette Crown Affair.) Though the first escape committing espionage, or carrying (i.e., action figure) from the library’s room is often traced to Japan in 2007 out a heist (Nicholson 2015, 2, 13, 15). -
Surprising Ways Puzzles Are Good for Your Brain Besides Being Fun, Working on Puzzles Gives You a Real Mental Workout
7 Surprising Ways Puzzles Are Good for Your Brain Besides being fun, working on puzzles gives you a real mental workout. Puzzles are a great family activity or solo pastime. Whether your puzzle of choice is a 1,000-piece jigsaw, the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, a wood brain teaser, or a 3D mechanical puzzle, doesn’t really matter because all puzzles share one key element, they power your brain. The types and varieties of puzzles are almost endless. There are seven specific ways that puzzles are good for your brain. So, clear off your coffee table, sharpen your pencils and get ready to boost your mind. Issue #31 1 ANALYTICAL CREATIVE Puzzles The two hemispheres of your brain control different functions. The left side of your brain Exercise controls analytic and logical thinking and the Both right-side controls creativity. When you are Sides of working on puzzles, you are engaging both sides 1 Your Brain and giving your brain a real mental workout. Improve Working on puzzles reinforce the connections between our brain Your cells—and form new ones—so they 2 Memory are a great way to improve short- term memory. We use memory in the process of completing a jigsaw puzzle when we remember shapes, sizes, and pieces and visualize where they fit in. Studies have shown that the growth of new brain connections that are formed to help reduce the amount of brain damage in Alzheimer’s patients. Improve Your Problem-Solving Skills The ability to solve problems and think critically is 3useful in almost any life situation and puzzles help us develop these skills. -
The 3D Jigsaw Puzzle: Mapping Large Indoor Spaces
The 3D jigsaw puzzle: mapping large indoor spaces Ricardo Martin-Brualla1, Yanling He1, Bryan C. Russell2, and Steven M. Seitz1 1University of Washington 2Intel Abstract. We introduce an approach for analyzing annotated maps of a site, together with Internet photos, to reconstruct large indoor spaces of famous tourist sites. While current 3D reconstruction algorithms often produce a set of disconnected components (3D pieces) for indoor scenes due to scene coverage or matching failures, we make use of a provided map to lay out the 3D pieces in a global coordinate system. Our approach leverages position, orientation, and shape cues extracted from the map and 3D pieces and optimizes a global objective to recover the global layout of the pieces. We introduce a novel crowd flow cue that measures how people move across the site to recover 3D geometry orientation. We show compelling results on major tourist sites. Keywords: Indoor scene reconstruction, maps, 3D jigsaw puzzle. 1 Introduction Recent breakthroughs in computer vision now allow us to model our world in 3D with extraordinary accuracy and visual fidelity from just about any set of overlapping photos [1{3]. However, a limitation of state-of-the-art 3D reconstruc- tion techniques from Internet photos is that large scenes tend to break up into a collection of disconnected pieces due to gaps in the depicted scene coverage or matching failures. Rather than a single, fully-connected Vatican model, for instance, we get a collection of smaller 3D pieces for different rooms, such as the Sistine Chapel, the Raphael Rooms, and the Hall of Maps, each having their own 3D coordinate system. -
Delorme Topographical Map Puzzle ~ Centered on Your Home ~ 0 1/8 1/4 1/2 3/4 1 Miles
LUXJIG_insert _cards_Aug2012_MM 12/09/2012 16:21 Page 1 Delorme Topographical Map Puzzle ~ Centered on your home ~ 0 1/8 1/4 1/2 3/4 1 Miles THE CHALLENGE BEGINS HER E! Build on your knowledge of the neighborhood and surrounding community with this specially commissioned Delorme map jigsaw puzzle. Starting with familiar areas, discover and explore new places around your house and hometown. To help get you started, the centrepiece is shaped like a house and is centered on your home! We have deliberately resisted the temptation to include a traditional guide print in the hope that it adds to the challenging fun and makes your jigsaw journey even more rewarding. Your puzzle is individually created from the Delorme North American Topographical map base, which is the most suitable and up to date mapping available to allow us to offer you the best image for your puzzle. Delorme’s latest ground-breaking dataset adds for the first time a subtle hill shading to the contours thus enhancing the mapping with a 3D relief effect. Combine this with over 30 years’ experience of market leading cartography and the result is a fantastic modern & accurate map base. We harness this imagery with a custom-built geolocation tool that allows us to place your chosen address in the centre of your jigsaw. Did you know the first ever jigsaw puzzles were the invention of an Englishman, John Spilsbury, during the late 18th century? Based in London and trained as an apprentice engraver & map maker at the court of King George III, Spilsbury went on to create map-based jigsaws – called ‘dissected maps’ – to help students learn geography. -
1970-2012 TOPIC INDEX for the College Mathematics Journal (Including the Two Year College Mathematics Journal)
1970-2012 TOPIC INDEX for The College Mathematics Journal (including the Two Year College Mathematics Journal) prepared by Donald E. Hooley Mathematics Department Bluffton University, Bluffton, Ohio Each item in this index is listed under the topics for which it might be used in the classroom or for enrichment after the topic has been presented. Within each topic entries are listed in chronological order of publication. Each entry is given in the form: Title, author, volume:issue, year, page range, [C or F], [other topic cross-listings] where C indicates a classroom capsule or short note and F indicates a Fallacies, Flaws and Flimflam note. If there is nothing in this position the entry refers to an article unless it is a book review. The topic headings in this index are numbered and grouped as follows: 0 Precalculus Mathematics (also see 9) 0.1 Arithmetic (also see 9.3) 0.2 Algebra 0.3 Synthetic geometry 0.4 Analytic geometry 0.5 Conic sections 0.6 Trigonometry (also see 5.3) 0.7 Elementary theory of equations 0.8 Business mathematics 0.9 Techniques of proof (including mathematical induction 0.10 Software for precalculus mathematics 1 Mathematics Education 1.1 Teaching techniques and research reports 1.2 Courses and programs 2 History of Mathematics 2.1 History of mathematics before 1400 2.2 History of mathematics after 1400 2.3 Interviews 3 Discrete Mathematics 3.1 Graph theory 3.2 Combinatorics 3.3 Other topics in discrete mathematics (also see 6.3) 3.4 Software for discrete mathematics 4 Linear Algebra 4.1 Matrices, systems of linear -
C-Space Tunnel Discovery for Puzzle Path Planning
C-Space Tunnel Discovery for Puzzle Path Planning XINYA ZHANG, The University of Texas at Austin ROBERT BELFER, McGill University PAUL G. KRY, McGill University ETIENNE VOUGA, The University of Texas at Austin Fig. 1. Puzzles we solve using our approach, roughly ordered by difficulty from left to right. Top row: alpha, alpha-z, alpha-j, alpha-g, double-alpha, claw, and enigma. Bottom row: duet (with 4 different grid sizes), Mobius, ABC, and Key. All but the alpha variants are Hanayama puzzles. Rigid body disentanglement puzzles are challenging for both humans and 1 INTRODUCTION motion planning algorithms because their solutions involve tricky twisting The Piano Mover’s Problem asks whether one can move a piano and sliding moves that correspond to navigating through narrow tunnels in between rooms through a sequence of rigid-body motions. This the puzzle’s configuration space (C-space). We propose a tunnel-discovery problem has inspired a great deal of work in computational geometry and planning strategy for solving these puzzles. First, we locate important features on the pieces using geometric heuristics and machine learning, and and robotics because it has a vast number of practical applications, then match pairs of these features to discover collision free states in the from collision-free navigation in automated warehouses, to path puzzle’s C-space that lie within the narrow tunnels. Second, we propose planning in pharmaceutical drug design. Rigid disentanglement a Rapidly-exploring Dense Tree (RDT) motion planner variant that builds puzzles are an interesting variant of the problem because they are tunnel escape roadmaps and then connects these roadmaps into a solution specifically designed to be difficult to take apart: they are notoriously path connecting start and goal states. -
The Leadership Puzzle, Putting the Pieces Together
THE LEADERSHIP PUZZLE “Putting the Pieces Together” Cindy Nelson December 2017 4-H/Leadership/2017-01pr THE LEADERSHIP PUZZLE Table of Contents Lesson 1: Four Corners of Leadership……………………………….3 Lesson 2: Cooperation……………………………………………….7 Lesson 3: Character…………………………………………………12 Lesson 4: Communication……………………………………..…....21 Lesson 5: Commitment……………………………………………. 26 2 THE LEADERSHIP PUZZLE Lesson 1: Four Corners of Leadership Objectives: 1. Relate leadership to putting together a puzzle. 2. Learn the five steps of leadership (putting the pieces together). 3. Understand the value of each person in the leadership process/puzzle. 4. Learn the Four Corners of Leadership: Communication, Commitment, Cooperation, and Character. Lesson Time: 20-30 minutes Materials Needed: • Four Corners of Leadership—Communication, Commitment, Cooperation, and Character—puzzle pieces. • Blank puzzle. • Microphone and speaker. • Small blank puzzle with pieces marked in different colors. Bag for puzzle pieces. Ice Breaker: Knee to Knee -- A Get Acquainted Activity Directions: Line up two rows (previous ambassadors in one row, new ambassadors facing them) of chairs or stand, facing each other. Participants sit in the chair so they are “knee to knee” with a partner (actually about 1 foot apart). Leader explains this is a get acquainted activity. Participants will introduce themselves to each other and then answer the question you ask. Each person has approximately 1 minute to answer the question. (I usually direct them to shake hands and introduce themselves because I think shaking hands is a nice way to connect and is also a life skill.) When time is up, ask participants to stand up and move X seats to the left (or right).