Rene's Puzzles

[jf]

For Water Snake (jiduvid): jaxizaz.

In place of the upward pipe, some sort of open-once gate control would force one to capture a sequence of segments. I will try a multi-segment solution later.

The medium difficulty I am thinking of would have you open some sort of gate, forcing you to choose a sequence up to the end of a snake's tail. The hard difficulty would only allow you to open the gate at the head of one of the snakes, forcing you to choose the entire snake.

[jnz]

For Water Snake (jiduvid): jaxizaz.

And I thought my solution would take a long time to solve for 0...

[Rene]

For Water Snake (jiduvid): jaxizaz.

And I thought my solution would take a long time to solve for 0...

Lol. You should have put a smiley on that statement 

Here is my solution. It takes the same approach as Werbad.

For Water Snake (jiduvid): sobybok

The medium difficulty I am thinking of would have you open some sort of gate, forcing you to choose a sequence up to the end of a snake's tail. The hard difficulty would only allow you to open the gate at the head of one of the snakes, forcing you to choose the entire snake.

That is a good idea, and I may try that later. But for now, you need to select a sequence of a certain length:

NEW PUZZLE

Water Snake II: juhibor xalicib

EDIT: Lo-and-behold! I just discovered that Werbad's newest puzzle has a similar challenge. They are sufficiently different, though, to require different strategies.
EDIT: Fixed a problem in the puzzle

[Werbad]

Is that 0-crate supposed to be a ?-crate? It seems a bit pointless to output it otherwise...

Edit:
For Water Snake II (juhibor): hovyhyr
I replaced the 0-crate with a ?-crate in this solution.

[jnz]

For Water Snake II (juhibor): lyzicux

[Werbad]

Made another solution that finds a matching stream faster, but has a longer initialization time:
For Water Snake II (juhibor): gikikyf
After initializing, this solution will find the first possible stream of correct length with the right sum.

[Rene]

Is that 0-crate supposed to be a ?-crate? It seems a bit pointless to output it otherwise...

You are entirely correct, of course. I changed it in the puzzle now. So jnz has another challenge...
Here is my solution:

For Water Snake II (xalicib): byvitog

[jnz]

I changed it in the puzzle now. So jnz has another challenge...

For Water Snake II updated (xalicib): tulidir

[Rene]

On suggestion by JF:

NEW PUZZLE

Water Snake III: tavirok

[Werbad]

For Water Snake III (tavirok): jyhapog
This solution should also solve an eventual hard version as described by jf.

It catches the first whole snake that is 8 or less crates and whose sum matches the target value

[Rene]

For Water Snake III (tavirok): jyhapog
This solution should also solve an eventual hard version as described by jf.

It catches the first whole snake that is 8 or less crates and whose sum matches the target value

You are fast, Werbad! Within two hours of posting 

Here is my own solution:

For Water Snake III (tavirok): vodonak

It is pretty fast, even though it looks more like the engine of a WW II submarine on full speed than like a quiet and patient snake catcher.
It detects any tail with a length up to 6 crates that matches the target.

NEW PUZZLE

And here is the last Water Snake puzzle, for which you have to catch the whole snake. Of course, Werbads solution to III also solves this one:

Water Snake IV: hutitin

[Werbad]

For Water Snake IV (hutitin): vohuvif

As the new snake-feed is one or two ticks slower it now only accepts snakes of 7 crates or less.

[Rene]

NEW PUZZLE

A pretty tough Rubiks challenge to move 10 crates into their correct positions. A look-up table that covers all combinations is definitely not possible.

Rubiks Rondo: gadekug

[Werbad]

For Rubiks Rondo (gadekug): dibakib
That was a tough one! My solution takes about 10 000 ticks to solve in the worst case.

I solved it by treating the crates as a single row with the target order 5-4-3-2-1-A-9-8-7-6. By using a 3 different swap-moves I could then move the crates to their destination one by one using a bubble-sort like method. I ended up using this method as it doesn't require me to reproduce the moves outside the machine, saving valuable space.

The moves I used were:
Swap 2 crates vertically: Left short
Swap 2 top crates: Right short, Left long, Left short
Swap 2 bottom crates: Left short, Left long, Right short

[Rene]

Yeah! That is why I like Rubicon so much. It seems that no problem is too hard, that you cannot a build a machine for it... just rattling and grinding away 

Here is my solution. I had it a little easier than you, because I discovered a way to rotate all the crates in one big loop.

For Rubics Rondo (gadekug): lebedyb

Here is also my solution for Water Snake IV. I manages to detect snakes up to 11 crates long:

For Water Snake IV (hutitin): bygyvox