You know me as The Stranger...
I recently challenged Egypt's Architects with the Test of the Aqueduct.
As Egypt's Architects struggled with planning out their various aqueduct systems, I noticed a distinct smugness on the part of Egypt's Scholars.
"Getting water to Sinai. A simple planning problem, two weeks in, and they haven't figured it out!"
Well, Scholars, let us see how you are with a similar problem. Create an imaginary landscape of Aqueduct towers, and challenge others to lay the pipes.
Too hard, and nobody - Scholar or not - will solve your challenge. Too easy, and every Architect and other simpleton will be telling you so.
This should be amusing.
I give you: The Test of the Pathmaker! -- Gharib, the Stranger
The Test of the Pathmaker is one of the challenges designed for Egypt by the previous generation, the people of Tale 1.
Design a miniature system of aqueduct towers, and challenge other to connect them in a loop. Living mossy towers (green) require the pipe to pass straight through, but turn adjacent. Dead (black) towers require the pipe to turn in place, but extend straight.
The Pathmaker puzzle field is a large grid (although the gridlines are not visible), some points of which contain green or black towers. The puzzle solver's goal is to place sections of pipe on the field in such a fashion that:
At any given point on the grid, a pipe segment can either go straight or bend 90 degrees (the pipeline cannot cross itself). Special restrictions apply to pipes passing through towers:
To place a pipe section, click on a point on the field. Repeated clicking will cycle through all of the legal moves possible at that point (including removing the section entirely).
Note that a single Pathmaker puzzle can have many possible solutions. Although the designer has to solve his own puzzle before he can open it (preventing impossible puzzles from being released to the public), the solver is not required to copy the designer's solution exactly. Any legal solution will work.
Solving a Pathmaker can be achieved by following the aqueduct towers (the green and black dots) and their rules.
Your first step in solving the puzzle should be to set the towers to obvious options:
After setting the above, many more trivial moves will become available. Some examples:
The problem starts when you deplated all such moves, and must "guess" the next one. Very often, a single guess will be followed by many other trivial moves, which might even solve the puzzle. A nice trick is to take a screenshot before your guess (use ALT+C to take a screenshot), guess, follow a bunch of trivial moves, and if you reach a non-solvable position, use your screenshot to recover.
However, more complex pathmakers will have a limited amount of trivial moves and a large amount of possible guesses. A possible rule of thumb to follow here is the Rule of Evens: try and divide the board to subsections (if a group of towers is blocked behind pipes, they must be connected to each other somehow and then "leave" their subsection). Only an even number of pipes can enter a subsection- otherwise there won't be enough pipes.
The test building is built in a Small Construction Site. Construction cost:
Can someone please update this part?