Show HN: Light Flip – A cell inversion puzzle game | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Light Flip – A cell inversion puzzle game

play.google.com

20 pointsrmal3015 comments

Why is this one different from the hundreds of similar clones?

Lights Out flips the neighbouring cells, this game flips all cells in the same row or column

You should probably make this really clear. I probably wouldn't download either version, however without any clear difference from the other 1000s of clones I instantly dismissed it after not seeing anything new.

Added a note

On even board to flip a square, hit square and hit all other squares in the same row and all other squares in the same column.

To flip 4 squares in a 2 x 2 arrangement, hit all of those 4 squares.

What makes the bigger grids hard is the size of my little finger.

This reminds me of a puzzle in an old point-and-click adventure with a Fridge with a lock like this...

http://questgame.ru/images/pilots/2.jpg

I had fun playing this game for a while. Eventually I discovered some fairly reliable algorithms which enabled me to collect all the achievements. I'd like some bigger boards to have a go with now!

Glad to hear that you're enjoying the game! I've added the 8x8 board. In the average case, it can be solved in around 32 moves using the most optimal algorithm.

Thanks :-)

I haven't downloaded the app, so maybe this makes sense somehow, but the following text from the app description confused me:

Difficulty ratings:

- 2x2 board - Easy

- 3x3 board - Easy

- 4x4 board - Hard

- 5x5 board - Medium

- 6x6 board - Impossible

- 7x7 board - Hard

Shouldn't the difficulty rating increase with increasing board size?

Solving an even square might be inherently harder than an odd square. I haven't played the game though.

Yep, it requires n^2 moves for even boards while odd boards require less moves (no formula found yet). Using a computer, I found, by brute force, that the 5x5 can be solved in 8 moves at most, the problem quickly becomes intractable for 7x7 and above. It looks like this might be NP hard according to another post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27436275/how-can-i-furthe...

Strategy that seems to be pretty effective: click all the squares that are originally yellow

Why would anyone play this game when he could just diagonalize (nxm)x(nxm) matrix in F2 and get a basis? (in case of non-singular, otherwise impossible) upd: misunderstood the game, it's about solving Ax=b in F2, so Gauss elimination.

Yeah, that's what the rest of us were thinking as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com