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Most of the time the mortal coil program will refuse to accept anything but a single input: when you hit a corner there is only one direction to go. A sensible UI design does not force the user to give input when the input will not affect the programs execution in any way. (This gets really annoying especially at the higher levels where these unnecessary clicks make up more than 90% of the path and the squares get small enough to require careful aiming.) After a click, please have the program continue automatically until there is some kind of choice involved.

Another missing essential feature is the time-honoured undo: a misclick 200 moves into the problem will really kill the user, especially combined with the abovementioned thou-shalt-not-skip-a-single-click policy.

Cheers,

-bass

PS.
excellent site you got here, and the puzzle is quite addictive :-)

wow, are you seriously solving up to level 75 by hand? i'm very impressed. i never made much of a UI because i figured that people wouldn't get that far manually.

the undo is kind of a pain, but i'll see about adding auto movement for the choiceless spots.

cheers,
adum

adum wrote:wow, are you seriously solving up to level 75 by hand?

I'm poking at a solver for Mortal Coil that doesn't suck, but don't want to use it till I get on the high score list by hand. I'm really enjoying solving them the old fashioned way.

good luck getting to level 99 by hand =)

i wonder tho if all that experience doing it by hand helps writing a good algorithm...

adum

My solver got critically slow around level 70, to the point that I could find a solution myself faster (e.g. within 10/15 minutes), so I've solved the next 40 or so by hand - right now they're taking 15 minutes or more each though, in general. My eyes are better at spotting patterns than my script is, and they're quite entertaining puzzles.

Solving the puzzles by hand definitely forces you to think about the algorithms.

It is not possible to solve levels >= 126 by hand. You simply cannot move along the left wall. So you have to type the path into URL or write a program...

lechat

My solver got critically slow around level 45
so I've solved the next levels by hand (to level 160).

I has now started over again to think of automation

You are super man really!

Isaev wrote:My solver got critically slow around level 45
so I've solved the next levels by hand (to level 160).

I has now started over again to think of automation

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