Amazing solutions. I'd never have believed it possible for the dillo to "jump the gap". Nice one, Paolo.
Apologies for not competing myself. Personal circumstances make it difficult, as my online presence is intermittent at best, and may stop suddenly without warning.
I've attached a few of my own solutions.
1964 - Ropey was my best effort. I did try a rope-cloth bridge, and got very close, but couldn't quite make it work for 1970.
This challenge also revealed a big discovery for me:
I was
shocked
to discover that the direction a piece of rope was attached in could make a big difference to the solution.
For example, "Ropey" succeeds when the rope is drawn from the bottom left node to the top right. And fails badly when the same rope is drawn from the top right to the bottom left.
(included in .zip)
Perhaps you regulars knew this already. But I had always assumed the rope would end up identical - with the same "links" and mechanics - regardless of the direction it was drawn in.
The example solutions show the rope breaks at different locations, leading to big changes thereafter. This happened with all of the development solutions I was trying. So something is fundamentally different.
As a result, I was trying all of my tests with ropes in both directions. Had I done "Ropey" the wrong way, and not known about this, I would have missed it....