RoboZZle Forums

In the biggest change to RoboZZle since the launch 3 weeks ago, puzzle designers can now allow tile-painting commands.

A 'paint red' command will cause the robot to paint the tile below it red. As of now, the command is represented in the user interface as a red circle.

Puzzles with paint commands show up under the Experimental tab in the game. Also, anyone can submit the extended puzzles; simply select the appropriate checkboxes in the puzzle designer.

I am almost afraid what kinds of crazy puzzles you guys will come up with. ;-)

Very very cool. It's a great addition as it is, though, is it actually Turing complete if you can only change state one direction? The classic formulation involves being able to erase symbols as well. I can't say off the cuff if they are ultimately equivalent.

Ah - nevermind. I based that only on your first example puzzle, the puzzle editor includes 'symbol erasure' by virtual of painting the other colors. (Can I turn this into a request for being able to edit/delete one's past forum posts to avoid such embarassment? :)

Well... you are actually making a case *against* adding comment deletion because you would have deleted your interesting comment. ;-)

(But seriously, I would definitely like to improve the management of both comments and puzzles.)

After a bit of thinking, I would guess that a "Turing machine" that can only overwrite symbols in one direction would be equivalent to a deterministic finite automaton. I.e., the tape provides no extra computational power.

But, I don't have a coherent argument for this.

Igoro, paint tile - cool feature! When puzzle "1-2-3-4... emm... 5..." was designed i couldn't believe what it works ^^