Talk:2916: Machine

rather late for an april fools comic innit? also there doesn't seem to be anything exciting in this one lol, none of the usual cool exploration easter eggs, as far as i could tell at least 172.71.178.76 16:41, 6 April 2024 (UTC)Erfaniom

We're exploring crowdsourced human creativity here, in a way, so it can be a lot more interesting then Randall's exploration comics, at least for me, because i did take two years of GCSE psychology and enjoyed it. 172.64.238.130

Just popped over using Chrome on Android and all I see is four "missing picture" logos spinning around, plus another down the bottom right... 141.101.68.193 18:13, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Okay, followup: it behaves quite differently on the non mobile site. You get two entry points with red balls and yellow balls and you need to place the various gizmos to direct the balls to the correct exit point. Once enough have correctly passed to turn the red X into a green tick, you have the option to submit. If you do, once you have named your design it will be added to the grid with other submissions all of which exist to push red and yellow balls around. (if you come across "Memories of Ragnarok", that's mine) 172.71.134.207 18:27, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

The number of inputs appears to vary between 1 and 4, each of a different color, with one color-coded output for each. Claire Kholin (talk) 18:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

On the "machine" section, you see lots of "under construction cells". Perhaps this will develop as more are submitted. I notice the "under construction tape" has "DJIA" and "31415", perhaps a reference to "dow jones industrial average" and the first five digits of pi. Zeimusu (talk) 18:37, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Whenever someone submits a cell, it fills in one of the under construction cells. Claire Kholin (talk) 18:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

I wanted to add an image for each object, but do not have the necessary access, can someone who has access add the images that I linked in the table so they can be included? Claire Kholin (talk) 18:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

I found a discussion with some guy talking about the API at https://euphoria.leet.nu/room/xkcd/ ; this could be useful for the wiki.

[c+1] now time to try fucking with the api [c+1] https://incredible.xkcd.com/

 [userwithnoaccount] 404

[c+1] it seems there are numbered machines under incredible.xkcd.com/machine/x

 [c+1] returns a grid of individual machinlets
 [c+1] which are uids like 3a7af27c-5389-5dcb-b660-3feab6be2ceb
 [c+1] they're stored at urls like incredible.xkcd.com/folio/3a7af27c-5389-5dcb-b660-3feab6be2ceb
 [c+1] there appear to be 33 machines total
 [c+1] the json it returns seems to refer to these as "versions"
 [c+1] $ curl -s https://incredible.xkcd.com/machine/21 | jq ".version"
       21
 [c+1] there is a machine/0, but it's all null
 [c+1] going to https://incredible.xkcd.com/machine/current redirects to the current machine
   [c+1] $ curl -sL https://incredible.xkcd.com/machine/current | jq ".version"
         35

[c+1] wait, is that the *total* number of mahcines? [c+1] i would've thought there'd be more [c+1] this whole think is rather esoteric [c+1] Written in rust, too: https://rapier.rs/ [c+1] Uh oh.

     https://i.hypercone.us/?v=8e283d
 [c+1] HMMM
       https://i.hypercone.us/?v=079f8f
 [c+1] it seems there is no limit
 [c+1] i've uploaded a ~50M title

172.70.57.146

Had quite a lot of fun, added a few 'successful' machines to the grid. Noted that whenever I try to use the Prism that (after a short delay) the comic-pane blanks and I need to refresh the page/get a completely new 'challenge' to start from scratch, so I'm just not using the prism at all (used most of the other items, in combination or 'just the one across the whole board', whichever seems most fun). But it doesn't seem to do what I'd like it to do, which is sort multiple colours from the same inflow into different outflow directions. Which would be very useful in a 'crossroads' situation, the general solution of directing them cross-path being too prone to random collisions. Also might be useful in the 'submitted machine grid', as I note that errors propagate, whereas adding a filter on all inputs would clean out (dispose of/send off to a valid gate?) the rogue balls. Anyway, gonna have to come back to this later when there's more time... Maybe then I'll even have something useful to add to the Explanation. 172.70.163.31 19:03, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

The balls appear to be different weights. I just saw a machine that used fans to separate yellows from greens and blues in a sort of 'wheat from the chaff' manner to direct them to their correct outputs. I wonder what other hidden tricks are included. 172.68.1.159 19:40, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

They're not all accepted, though it makes you think they are. Or something else more complex is going on we haven't realized yet. I made a machine that was working reliably, submitted it, and saw it on the overall grid. Reloading from a different browser I found the same location of the machine, with the same surroundings, but my machine had been replaced. It's nowhere else on the grid either. The first browser still shows it (but not after a reload with a cache clear). I'm not sure if there's some kind of "save" event that needs to happen beyond seeing your machine in the broader one, or if all user collaboration is an illusion, or if the system changes its mind about us somehow.

Yeah, i've been seeing this too. Please tell me if you find any of my machines, images at https://i.hypercone.us/?v=22d562 , https://i.hypercone.us/?v=ad8e3a , and https://i.hypercone.us/?v=8d4d6a . I want to be one of the few to have added Catalan and Spanish to the grid. 172.71.134.164 20:56, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

I've added some more observations to the page. Also, a guess which is too uncertain to put on the main page: The ball launcher for the yellows on the far left side misses a lot, and the yellow container isn't the one on the left. So I think the whole machine with crossing streams will result in the colors being sorted in their container order, and possibly have the streams combined and deposited at the bottom just above the containers. --172.71.147.100 21:07, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

has anyone seen the boat at the very bottom? Mushrooms (talk) 21:21, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

trying to see it on Firefox for Ubuntu and it just tells me to "visit xkcd.com to view" - THAT'S WHERE I AM?! Tried clearing website data (but not my entire cache) and that didn't help. Is there something I'm missing?

Oooh, just had one with four ball-entries (four colours) and three exits (one caters for two arrows). Pity it's rather complicated to get entries to exits (even if I can merge two of the streams). Might have to give up on it, but I'd like to have seen how it fits in with the 'submited grid'. i.e. someone else gets a two-colour introduction spot. 162.158.74.119 22:37, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Me again. I'm just refreshing the page, looking at the pattern of entries/exits (just a dozen or so screens in, getting some repeats of pattern, indicating that it's going back to tiles it was suggesting before, probably depends on how many others are contributing and extending...)

Found another 'double-colour' example. Two yellows from the same side, which probably means that there's a two-yellows been asked to exit from the neighbour (will check shortly).

Quickly adapting from my spreadsheet notation, "R, Y, G, B" in order, each "(Entry, Exit)", I've been using <dir> of L/R/T/B and a number (nominally percentage, though seems to include only values of 20, 30, 50, 70 and 80, so it might be more 1/6..5/6?) relating to the distance along from L to R (for T/B) or T to B (for L/R).

This line is therefore (0,0)(L20+L70,R30+B70)(R80,L80)(T70,L50) ... no reds, two yellow pairings, a red pairing, a blue pairing. Would require at least two path-crossings (but I was going to calculate those things later, and double-colours might confuse my intended simple line-intersection calculation).

...anyway, spent some time on this message, which might mean I'll get into a 'new batch' of available patterns as people have succeeded some of the challenges that I've been 'swiping left'. 172.70.162.20 19:28, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

...very next click: (0,0)(T30+L20,R20+R70)(R80,L80)(R50,B50), which is clearly the actual left-neighbour of the above. 172.70.162.19 19:32, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Ok, stopped my refreshing to 'solve' a screen. First of all I routed both yellows entries (right-upper and upper-right) to one yellow exit (middle-left) and gradually teased the greens across (lower-left to middle-right), as that way I was avoiding a criss-cross of balls, but the the other yellow exit (left-lower) was, of course, invalid.

Changed it to drop one stream of yellows down towards the lower exit, across the rapidly firing greens (added a fan to filter away the occasional yellow that gets bounced over there, not much of an opportunity to filter falling-greens out of the yellow exit, so apologies to whoever gets the sceen below). Submited as "Two Yellows, One Green!", whether or not that'll save (apparently, I should continue to contribute and not refresh/close, or else the server will not keep the solution?).

Interestingly, all four adjacent tiles are "Under construction", and if I scroll up... *DARN* the comic has blanked out (nothing there between the upper PREV/RANDOM/NEXT buttons and the lower ones, just whitespace). This may mean that it did not save. This is the kind of 'page crash' I get when I try using a Prism or get too many balls rattling around on top of a Black Hole. Perhaps it doesn't like that I'm scrolling into an Under Construction that shouldn't be there? (But then, why is it there?)

Anyway, all extra information for everyone.

I'll just refresh the page and go back and do some more entry/exit mapping, maybe? 172.70.162.20 20:17, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

If you combine a bunch of these silly claw things in the middle by just spamming it, it begins to lag and do some chaotic collisions, even without balls colliding on it. It's curious how it does that seemingly randomly though. I wonder how calculations are added and if there's a tiny sprinkle of RNG. (Also, errors occur and say something about damaging recursion in the Rust programming language, so I guess we know how it was made. It's also pretty weird how there's not a lot of opening combinations? It's possible that the machine loops over in chunks of gears or something (that's what I'll call them). (talk) 13:15, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

If you place a black hole in the centre of a wheel, it makes the wheel behave unpredictably between resets. Sometimes it's almost normal, sometimes it's a lot faster than usual, and sometimes it's stopped but launches balls that touch it with extreme force. I was able to use this to submit a machine which didn't actually let a single ball through after being submitted. https://i.hypercone.us/?v=928bcd 162.158.33.149 01:19, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

The page says that (and I have taken note of) the ball hue is coded to certain values, but is there a logic to those values that might be derived from the colour (either as RGB triplet or HSV/other colourspace definition). For example, the two ball-types with zero green component in their makeup are 'unit density' (green is far heavier "green+red" is far lighter, so it's not a simple relationship, unless it converts from °hue, in some way) and the only secondary colour exhibits non-zero drag. There's the possibility that it just derived from "we need different properties, we need different colours, we have no reason to connect either with other deliberately" or even some non-mathematical symbology (fire=red, water=blue(?), earth=green, air(/sunlight?)=yellow). But it makes me wonder what combination of properties cyan/magenta balls might have, if added. (Or is the choice of those four colours constrained, anyway? Though R/G colorblindness is already something of an accessibility failure, if anyone suffers that.) 172.69.194.205 17:02, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Python script to get the URL and title of each Cell in the current machine

Result of running that script at the moment (encoded with ROT13 because pastebin wouldn't let me save it otherwise)

Result of running that script on the first 42 machines, at least on these it looks like the only difference is that one cell is added each time? 172.71.99.195 17:22, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I've submitted four now, none of which was accepted. I tend to spend a lot of time getting them just right. Any hints as to what the acceptance criteria might be? Or do I just stink at this? 172.69.59.204 19:47, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

There appears to be a new object: a cat that bats things that touch it. 172.69.214.39 20:17, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Is anyone else experiencing the bug where prisms cause the comic to disappear (leaving only the white background where it was) after a while? It makes viewing the whole machine basically impossible. (On further testing it appears to be firefox-exclusive.) 172.70.162.38 20:31, 7 April 2024 (UTC)