Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[bluea]

Posit "Tic-tac-toe" puzzle.

It would be at least potentially baffling if you had to lose the game to unlock the chamber.

There are nominally three outcomes:
A) You win
B) You tie
C) You lose.

Except - you can't actually win, since the computer is correctly programed. This is not something that's going to obvious by casual observation. If you play correctly - which puzzlers are prone to do - you still don't gain entry.

The game could also be a pattern matcher. As in: IF the computer connects the three westernmost tiles THEN unlock, ELSE fun.

[The Architect]

Now THAT is interesting. Rather than a series of levers, your final input for the data you've collected is correctly losing a game of tic-tac-toe.

Bravo.

[Itnetlolor]

Damn, I lost again.

[Urist McOverlord]

Between the tic-tac-toe and the vault, there must be a 3-long by 1-wide set of constructed floors, flanked by magma-falls. Failing the condition to open the door (which, for maximum awesome, would be a series of drawbridges and floodgates) causes the steel hatches beneath the magma falls to close, causing the magma to flood over the walkway and into the entryway. After a certain point, the rising magma causes the room to further flood with water, encasing the whole shebang in obsidian.

Then for good measure, it opens a cage filled with tentacled &. And orcs.

[The Architect]

Cool magmatrap idea. There's a problem if you want it to be reset-able, though.

[Urist McOverlord]

mine out the obsidian, and replace the caged beasts with a war dragon. Tie the hatches and water systems to a couple levers in the main hall while to prevent warm/wet wtone messages (and warm/wet miners) Actually I now want to integrate this with my current entrance...

[Innominate]

I have an idea for a keycode system. It's not terribly complicated, and not as awesome as a fully 3D puzzle would be, but it's something.

Have five one-digit displays (base 10 probably), each able to be modified with a lever. Then have a final lever which "pipes" the input displayed into the "lock" logic gates, with 2 (or 3 for trickiness) results. Correct result unlocks the room, incorrect result puts a timelock on it (an in-game month, for example). If you have a third possibility, it can trigger a death option. As an example, you might make it so that if the number given is divisible by 3 (equivalent to SUM(digits) divisible by 3) then a second entrance is opened to the intruder. This second entrance* is identical to the first, except the lever you pull, thinking it will finally open the vault, actually drowns you in magma.

If you want to be really sadistic you can make time delays and everything, opening up a new escape route just before the magma would reach them.

*You can actually have just the one entrance and do the same thing if you link the lever to an AND gate with the lock output for opening the door (lever must be pulled and lock correctly solved) and the same inputs through an A NOT B gate to trigger the magma. Fun with logic gates!

[100killer9]

I know!
Anyone reach the castle in nethack? I didn't. But to gain entry, you must play mastermind with the computer. Only this time, several combinations might kill you with magma, such as ones that let you easily guess the code (AAAAA, BBBBB...)

[The Architect]

The combination lock is pretty cool, Innomiate, but the only way I can think to implement that is through pressure plates and water levels. And I am struggling severely to think of a way to have more than 3 possibilities per slot without the game's evaporation mechanic ruining it.

Ah, I think I have a way. You'd add water to a visible area until it filled to the correct level, then pull a lever isolating a single tile over a hatch, which is located over your pressure plate. This for each slot in turn, with the ability to reset each slot if the water level doesn't come out correctly (to compensate for the game mechanics) and a final lever simultaneously dropping all of your water levels onto the plates below. You'll be hindered at every step of the way except the final pull, of course, by the timed delay on device activation in DF.

Now who wants to build it!?

[Jyppa]

A lever-controlled combination lock shouldn't be too complicated, as long as you're willing to live with increments of one, and a 200 step wait between lever pulls. For each 0-9 dial, just build a 10-step increment-by-one counter (several ways to do this, I'm partial to interrupted repeaters), a simple device that turns on when toggled by the desired lever, causing water to be pumped onto a plate which sends a signal to the counter to go up by one as well as immediately resetting itself by turning off the feeding pump and turning on a second one to drain the tile. This would require a wait between pulls of at least 100 ticks, but two fast consecutive pulls should actually be able to increase the counter by two, making it a little harder to screw up by input.

Triggering stuff with counters is as simple as linking triggers to mechanical logic gates, which can be made extremely compact for any AND/OR combination. If you're feeling particularly evil, make the the different levers cause different counter increments, then add "trap" combinations, or make the dials represent a single long counter (say 0-999) and make the levers work in increments of say, 3, 7 and 11, with a defined target number to reach. The latter variant can be designed to be quite diabolical, I think I might have to steal this idea for one of my fortresses.

[The Architect]

I think I like my version that doesn't require hours of creating logic gates for each slot better :-P

[Jyppa]

Well, to be honest, those logic gates would pretty much be 6 or so gears built together. Maybe up to 12 for some display segments if you want proper numbers. Doesn't exactly take hours to build, and the actual counters can be compressed to 15 x 36 tiles or so (three z-levels including channels). It's also trivial to scale up, and works well with the tiny "level-toggler" (device outputting brief ON signal on any level pull).

[The Architect]

Well, it is dreadfully complex, and it does accomplish something with a huge amount of effort that could be done with a small amount. So, it is quite dwarfy.

[AnotherDwarvernDeath]

Well, has anyone made tic-tac-toe in DF yet? We'll start there.
But the general idea of Dwarfputers seems sound to me in vaults. Overly complex to build.

http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1813-tictactoev10simple

[100killer9]

Well, has anyone made tic-tac-toe in DF yet? We'll start there.
But the general idea of Dwarfputers seems sound to me in vaults. Overly complex to build.

http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1813-tictactoev10simple

But no AI.
Whatever. Maybe I could use tacticus to lock the vault. Beat the game at that, and you win.