words » Fun

My Fantastic Contraptions

Jeff Fitzsimons — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:52:09 +0000

A collection of solutions for Fantastic Contraption:

My Solutions:

Tube – a minimal tube crawler.
U-Turn – a floppy, crawling chariot.
U-Turn (again)) – a simple cart which uses leverage to apply force on the ceiling.
Back and Forth – an awful contraption.
Back and Forth – a better version which uses many wheels for low friction, and no bridge.
Higher – a ridiculously simple stick-flicker.
Around the Bend – a tiny triangle that flops to change direction.

Solutions by Others Which I Like:

Back and Forth – brilliantly simple because of it’s use of rotation reversal.
Four Balls – reciprocating machinery.
Four Balls – multi-stage machinery.

My Experiments:

Spinner – just a fast-spinning construct.
Glitching Spinner – a spinner experiment that glitches and goes horribly wrong.
Glitching Star – six glitching spinners, all tied together.
Super Glitching Star – a much more rigid version of the glitching star. Explodes into the finish.
Bizarre Spinner – a Mars mission that accelerates bizarrely.

Neat Flash Games for Nerds

Jeff Fitzsimons — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:32:47 +0000

These three games present interesting logic puzzles:

Fantastic Contraption – build a machine to get an item into the target zone.
Light-bot – provide simple commands to make your robot traverse obstacles (publisher site with annoying, talking banner ads is here).
Chronotron – solve puzzles using a time machine.