Hey guys, a friend of mine who is into twisty puzzles suggest I post a puzzle game that I created with some friends from college. You can play it here:

https://spinpossible.com/index.pl

The game is called Spinpossible and the goal is to arrange a 3x3 grid of tiles in order 1-9 by spinning rectangular subsets of that grid. The game gets extremely challenging very quickly (we think its one of the hardest mathematical puzzle games out there), and there is a lot of interesting mathematics and group theory behind the game (see the math link on our site if you're interested).

The game is free (and ad-free) on the web / iOS / android and we're basically trying to get feedback on the puzzles from avid puzzle fans like ourselves so please check it out and let us know what you think!

Thanks

Wow, that's really cool. Commutators and conjugates are introduced quickly which make it similar to twisty puzzles.

Awesome, glad you like it!

We tried to introduce commutators and conjugates very early because one of our goals (and one of the reasons we thought trying to make a twisty puzzle into a video game might work) is to have the game teach you the basic operations that you need to solve more complex puzzles. If you keep playing a bit and get into the no-singles and no-singles no-doubles levels (where you cannot spin individual tiles or groups of 2 tiles) that becomes really clear.

Definitely let me know if you have any thoughts/suggestions for neat puzzles or for how to improve the game

I can't look at the game right now, but to be honest, whenever I see this I am usually skeptical. Can you expand on this? Why is it so hard compared to other puzzles?

Because the puzzle must be solved by the minimum number of moves. This constraint makes it very hard.

With this kind of constraint, it's easy to construct harder puzzles. For example, "solving the common Rubik's cube using the minimum number of turns" would be much harder.

I totally appreciate your skepticism, I know way to many puzzles make those kinds of claims, but Spinpossible is quite tough and Schuma hit the nail on the head as to why.

If you think of a puzzle like the rubix cube, solving the puzzle in any number of moves is a reasonable challenge. The rubix cube is a complex puzzle with an unrestricted solution space.

In Spinpossible solving a puzzle in any number of moves would be trivial but because we require you to find minimal length solutions. It turns out that finding minimal solutions to a simpler puzzle actually can be much harder than finding some solution to a more complex puzzle.

In general in group theory finding minimal length solutions amounts to finding shortest paths on a Cayley graph and this is known to be a very difficult problem in a purely mathematical sense. If you play enough Spinpossible you get a very good intuitive feeling for the game and most puzzles become tractable with careful thought but the hardest puzzles will still be extremely difficult.

Furthermore, later in the game we experiment with restricting the set of allowed moves, and in that case, finding any solution to a puzzle can become quite hard regardless of the length.

This is an excellent program! I love how it simply presents the basic maneuvers for solving twisty puzzles.

Glad you like it

One of our goals was to use the fact that it was a video game rather than a physical puzzle to try and introduce the basic concepts as the difficulty ramps up so that ideally it could be challenging for experts but still approachable for beginners, so we're also kind of hoping it might be a way for being to introduced to some of the basic ideas of how to solve any kind of twisty puzzle.

I've been getting more and more addicted to Spinpossible. It really does become very difficult very fast!
Is anyone else here playing it?

Any chance you could make the Android app able to be stored on an external storage device (sd card)? My phone has horrible internal storage quality but this game looks like a ton of fun.

I tried it out and got stuck on the last level of Grab Bag (going for absolute minimum on every level).

I want to try this game, but unforturnately, it is completely incompatible with my screen reader.

Possibly, I'll look into it, our app is written in flash and then ported to android via adobe air so we are somewhat limited in that we can only do whatever adobe air supports, I'm not sure if they let you store apps on external drives.

Cool, thank you. I'll be sure to keep my fingers crossed. I've really enjoyed the few levels in played on my roommates laptop.

Sorry to hear that, what type of screen reader do you have?

I found some documentation on how to allow for that, hopefully it will work and we'll include it in the next update (should be our within the next few weeks). Will keep you posted

Also if any of you guys like the game please take a few minutes to rate it in google play / itunes and be sure to tell your friends. We're just three friends from college who made a puzzle game so we rely 100% on referrals to get our game out there.

I am using the Orca screen reader on a harddrive install of Adriane Knoppix, and since you mention that it is written Flash, I think it worth noting that Orca is completely useless with anything using Flash, so its not your fault that I cannot play the game.

Ah, yeah the game won't run on anything that doesn't support adobe flash or adobe air unfortunately.

check your pm, I think we have something working for you

I'm considering adding the ability for players to create their own starting configuration, number of spins allowed, and mode (regular, no singles, etc) and letting them share those via FB/Twitter/link/etc. Before we spend any time making that interface I was wondering, is this something that would interest any of you guys or are you mainly interested in solving the existing puzzles rather than making your own?

Any feedback would be appreciated, (including unrelated suggestions for how to improve the game :p).

Fyi, we got the custom build we send you integrated and published on android / itunes so hopefully that functionality will continue to work if you update the app. Thanks for your help, I'm sure that functionality will benefit other players!