AR Forum Contest #4 (29/06/06 - 03/07/06)

[Ogre]

While unseen, I believe the nature of rubber means forces are pushed around everywhere, causing small changes to have wide reaching effects.

Boy isn't that the truth. I've seen some very small changes have surprisingly large effects on seemingly unrelated parts of my solution.

I just sent off an improved solution, but it's painful trying to go any further down the path I'm on right now. Unless I come up with something very different I may be done with this one.

Still a fun level, just very touchy.

[squint]

The effect seems more significant when you hang something off the rubber on a piece of string, rather than building on top of it, so my guess is that the shock as the string goes tight (or anything else moves, for that matter) causes the rubber to vibrate. In turn, this makes all the rubber vibrate. Chaos is the slightest tweak meaning your 'dillo touches the rubber at the different phase of the vibration. The effect being so significant for a barely visible vibration is the usual problem with finite time steps.

The anchor points are presumably very very strong, but not completely fixed, because completely fixing anything to the spot in a physics sim tends to result in divisions by zero (it is equivalent to stating that the anchor points have infinite mass).

[kingofthespill]

I think that in addition to rubber everywhere the demands of both the starting and finishing areas is what is leading to hypertensive solutions .

[PeterT]

I wish we had 0.001 steps in timers

Anyway, a small update: I broke 1700.

[Ogre]

I predict that beating $1700 will not win you this contest

[PeterT]

Well, my initial guess after the first hour with the level was that the winner would be around $2400, but I'm not sure if that's possible anymore.

You're welcome to surprise me of course

[edit]
Now I implemented a new approach which beat 1900 without tweaking. What do you predict about this one?

[kingofthespill]

$1900 sounds too good to be true. It probably is true which somehow makes it worse.

[Ogre]

Well, my initial guess after the first hour with the level was that the winner would be around $2400, but I'm not sure if that's possible anymore.

You're welcome to surprise me of course

[edit]
Now I implemented a new approach which beat 1900 without tweaking. What do you predict about this one?

Same prediction as $1700 I'm over $2000.

[kingofthespill]

So Ogre must be implying $2000 +...

[Ogre]

So Ogre must be implying $2000 +...

Or explying it (I did edit that into my post, but before you posted)

[kingofthespill]

The question is how much over $2000

[Ogre]

The question is how much over $2000

An excellent question, sir!

[kingofthespill]

I expect Ogre, Peter, and I will all tie then .

[Bob]

Today I had enough time to try this level.
My best result so far is over 2100.

[squint]

I guess I should stop tweaking my 1500 then . . .