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Escott is an implementation of fiendishly hard sliding puzzle devised by someone of the same name (that is, 'Escott'). Martin Gardner described Escott's sliding puzzle as "the most difficult [he] had seen in print" (in, I think, Mathematical Circus). He was writing in the 70s and the puzzle dates from 1938. Now you can give it a try on your Vr3. The aim is to swap the pieces that are in the upper left and lower right corners, the positions of the other pieces doesn't matter. The 'target' configuration is shown in the bottom left of the screenshot. Note that it's a bit difficult to get distinguishable grey scales on the Vr3, a contrast setting of around 105 is ok (little bit higher than the usual romdisk default).
The program is put together as a general sliding puzzle engine, so more puzzles may be added in the future. If anyone knows of any good ones...
And so here is the source escott-1.1.tar.gz
As with all the Vr3 software available here, Escott was tested on SNOW version 1.2. Reports of success or failure to build for newer Vr3 setups are welcomed.
New: This release (1.1) fixes a strange (I think compiler-related) bug where only one piece of the puzzle appears. When this bug originated I don't know as I only just discovered it when recently recompiling Escott after some time away from Vr3 development (it's never been reported to me, and it definitely used to work).
To build: Unpack the binary and cd to the directory
tar xvzf escott-1.0.tar.gz
cd escott-1.0
Build for SNOW, note this assumes the SNOW toolchain is to be found in /opt/snow-gcc,
source use_snow
make escott
Then you will find in the directory vr3 is another directory called escott. This directory needs to go somewhere on the Vr3 that is the current directory when the program is run. i.e. /home/default
cd vr3
rsync -r escott agenda::default/
Finally, if desired, create a menu link to the program.
telnet agenda
login: default
cd .wmx/Games
ln -s /home/default/escott/escott Escott
exit
Any comments, questions etc. to: escott@vaagmaer.com.
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Escott
