Some of you might remember a little bit of Neopets mania last summer. There was this one puzzle that just seemed so hard, that I had to write a program to solve it. It took over my life for months. I finally gave up trying to solve it entirely. In February, I took it up again, and given some algorithmic help by a past champion, finally beat Shapeshifter.
It’s all very Karate-kid-ish.
I only played Neopets to solve this one puzzle, and now that it’s done, I won’t ever play again. I’ll put my Neopets up for adoption. But for the entire month of April, my name will live at the top of the high scores, and if I die tonight, I’ll die knowing that I died a bona fide champion.
This wasn’t the final puzzle, but it was close. Surprisingly, this is one of the easier puzzles.
Oh my god, you finally solved it! Wow! Huge congratulations, I thought you had give up completely. I’m glad you got it =)
Heh…. sensei257 was a lot of help — you see him at #2, but he’s been the champ several times. He was a little disappointed that I was going to stop Shifter development (my solver) to work on games — but what’s the point? If I can solve it once, I can solve it again. He was a lot of help to me, but he claims his solver is an entirely different beast, and I have to admit, I was hoping to get a peek at it one of these days.
I actually finished it weeks ago, but was waiting until last night to place the final piece so I could claim the #1 spot, and get 750 Neopoints a day for free for the entire month.
You heard right here, Tipa writes hacks for MMOs.
Just promise me you’ll never write the next WoWGlider unless you make it so that automatically deletes all the items on the character after using it for 5 minutes.
I don’t even PLAY WoW!
But I want to say up front, that I am not associated with WARGlider in any way, aside from some UI enhancements, and the elf-ear-lengthening plug-in.
For vowing to never play again, you seem pretty excited about getting 750 NeoPoints a day for a month.
Don’t be ashamed to admit you love playing games with colorful little animals, Tipster. =P
I don’t care about the points, I have over 150,000 now anyway that I will never spend. It’s just one of the perqs.
Big Congrats Tipa – You PWNED it!
Thats great tipa I’m so happy for you!
Hi,
I was just wondering if I could maybe use your program, I have been trying to finish the game forever, but no luck so far.
Well, unless you’re comfortable with Python on Linux, probably you couldn’t. I’ve thought the entire fun of Shapeshifter was in developing the program to solve it — I guess I always thought of it primarily as a subtle sort of programming and algorithm design contest. That pod racer bit in Star Wars Ep 1, where everyone made their own pod racers, that is what it’s like.
There is a solver out there, written by someone who goes by ‘kvho’ called ‘ss.c’. It’s a ‘C’ implementation of a fairly decent solver. It doesn’t include a scraper — a program to take the board and pieces from the web page and feed them to the program — but it won’t be hard to write one. There’s a scraper around for it but it needs some changes to work. And even Kvho’s requires you to be comfortable with compiling and running ‘C’ programs…
I don’t really know of any easy to use solvers that can solve all the way to level 100. There was a Mac-only solver that could solve up to level 20, and I saw someone write about a Visual Basic one that could get into the thirties, but beyond that is where the fun starts.
Wow, congratulations 🙂 Thats a great achievement!
Just curious, but do you know if its possible to get past around level 22-23 without a solver? I’m somewhat programming-challenged, and just can’t seem to get past there working through them in my head xD
No idea, I gave up solving them on my own at around level 7. They were too tough for me!
Ahh lol I made it up to level 25 after I posted that last night, but then the double change got introduced… I think I give up for now, its impossible for me with that!
Thanks for replying, and congrats again on finishing your solver/getting to level 100 🙂
ive been on 26 for almost an year
That’s about the time you need to get really creative with a solver.
i got to 26 without a solver still going i am 1 step from completing this next puzzle gotta wait till tomoro
You, sir, have my respect!
I’m afraid I always saw it as an excuse to write a program. I only ever solved the first couple by hand.
There is a solver at http://shapeshafter.neolanz.com
It’s good till about level 32
They have a cool idea for efficiencies with single square pieces. That could make those kinds of puzzles faster to solve, as long as the number of single square pieces is not more than the order of the puzzle.