I recently found out about crosshare.org and proceded to post my first #crossword #puzzle in German. https://crosshare.org/crosswords/uDlZXgGwgdfY6EM1Oi7s/justiz-und-gerechtigkeit

With Secret Solver over, I can now reveal the gift I made for betaveros, the puzzler assigned to me in the event! I worked all December on this and I’m happy with how it turned out.

In accordance with their interests, I made a black-box/interactive #puzzle: the kind you must fiddle with to figure out how it works, and then deduce how to solve it. The whole thing consists of 9 subpuzzles, 8 of which are interactive (the last one is a more traditional meta).

https://files.timwi.de/Puzzles/Secret%20Solver%202024/betaveros/B-as-in-Black-Box.html

The gift I received in Secret Solver couldn’t have been more aptly personalized. My santa saw my #esolang video series I spent all year creating [0] and decided to make a #Funciton #puzzle for me! [1]

I will avoid spoiling the puzzle for you guys here but you should definitely give it a try! There are more layers to it than it appears on the surface; it’s not just a matter of figuring out a Funciton program.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkG32PHxWoJaetjKUMVRONWLgRHQVjmtc

[1] https://files.timwi.de/Puzzles/Secret%20Solver%202024/Timwi/Secret%20Solver%202024%20gift%20for%20Timwi.txt

Finally done! 😅 Worked on my last Funciton video for the last 4 months or so. Finally uploaded and published it today! This concludes my initial video series on the language, thanks to anyone sticking with it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmCcxGOediM

A team of 10 jigsaw puzzlers from the US just beat the Guinness World Record for a 2,000-piece puzzle. The previous record was 1h 24min 4sec. The new record — wait for it — is... 49 minutes 13 seconds! What an improvement!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5uPS6RAaOM

@majorlinux @arstechnica I'm confused by the total lack of nuance in this article... One would think Ars Technica should know the difference between using AI to do some spellchecking or phrasing improvements, versus autogenerating a whole novel.

This weekend I took part in ABELO, an Esperanto-language board games meetup in Berlin. We played a lot of games across three days, most of which I liked. We played Mao as well, if only for one hour. My biggest surprise was that several people were interested in solving Sudokus — an entirely solitary activity — when they saw that I have a stack of them in my backpack (which I didn’t print for this occasion and originally didn’t plan on bringing). We also did a number of New York Times crosswords.

I also forgot to post about *Lorelei and the Laser Eyes*. This is the longest puzzle game I’ve ever live streamed — it took me 17½ hours to play through. Here’s the first part; link for second part in the description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbxmzmycCw4 #lorelei #puzzlegame #puzzlegames #playthrough

I also forgot to post about this two weeks ago: I played through *Machinika Museum*, a puzzle game similar in spirit to *The Room*. Full 3¼-hour playthrough here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vQ9bN7q3ZQ #puzzlegame #puzzlegames #playthrough

Today a friend showed me *Cooperative Chess* (https://steamcommunity.com/app/1585350/) and I’m loving it! It’s an interesting mix between logic challenge and social cuetaking because you have to predict what your partner will do so that you achieve the goal together. Very clever game idea!! #chess #chessvariant #coopgaming

Played #Scrabble against my friend Quinn. I had a really bad start and he was in the lead most of the game, not least because his TEARING (col M) was the only bingo in the entire game... but then I pulled ahead with some lucky draws. Exciting game! #tabletopsimulator

He did it! My friend solved my challenge that I gave him. I wrote the gcd (greatest common divisor) function in his #esolang, #Ndim. He translated it to C# and figured out what it means. I actually wrote the function graphically in Inkscape and this is what it looked like!

Then I wrote this converter: https://codeberg.org/Timwi/NdimFromSvg

#esolangs #esotericprogramming

So yesterday I met a new friend who is interested in esoteric programming languages as much as I am. He showed me his new creation, called Ndim (https://esolangs.org/wiki/Ndim), which is a multidimensional language inspired by Befunge. I think it’s super impressive for a 14-year-old’s first esolang!

Today I wrote a little program in his esolang and gave it to him as a challenge to find out what it does. (rubs hands)

#esolang #esolangs #esotericprogramming #ndim

I dug up my “grids and coordinates” library RT.Coordinates yesterday and implemented a new type of grid geometry that I came up with last week. I call it PentaCell and it consists mostly of pentagons but with some narrow rhombuses to fill the gaps.

GitHub: https://github.com/RT-Projects/RT.Coordinates/
Documentation: https://docs.timwi.de/RT.Coordinates/RT.Coordinates

Example with custom colors and a randomly generated maze:

Today I’m starting a new #YouTube channel. I’m going to be describing my esoteric programming language “Funciton” in real excrutiating detail. If this is something you’re interested in, consider liking and subscribing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y42gOeaeya4 #esotericprogramming #esolang #esolangs #funciton

Been playing around with #SVGfilters again. I came up with the following, which looks quite nice at full size. However, it looks very different (and not as I intended) when you look at it in the smaller screen size in codepen. I’m surprised by that as it means SVGs are not quite reliably scalable. https://codepen.io/Timwi/pen/ZEZRqGo

Visited this month’s #PuzzledPint again today (https://puzzledpint.com/events/april-2024/). The puzzles were okay. The highlight for me was that they (the Berlin group) picked a location that sold a really nice vegan pizza (https://twofellas.beer/). 10/10 would recommend again!

I have no clue why I just made this. #random #humanrights

Finally I can use Tabletop Simulator again. A technical issue caused it to refuse to download images from external sources. There were no error messages; it would just sit at 0% forever. Many thanks to my friend Mistral for doing the deep-dive Google research and discovering the fix. Of course, there was no response from Berserk Games to my bug report; why should a company help someone with their product if they've already paid them. (Sigh.) Anyway, here's the fix. https://steamcommunity.com/app/286160/discussions/3/4298194451992066896/

6th place in today's TAC tournament. Was playing with Susanne for the first time. We talked a lot about a wide variety of things, including but not limited to: politics (esp. Brexit), esoteric programming, and graphic design. She's a graphic designer who created a cow/dragon-like character who is apparently reasonably popular with local children. She showed me a YouTube video of a flash mob where they had somebody dancing while cosplaying as the character.