NONONONO- NOT BALLS MACHINES! I CAN'T GET OUT! MUST. WATCH. BALLS...
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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xkcd
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Randall has somehow weaponized my love for the Blue Ball Machine. He is a threat to us all.
Nerd sniped. ^^
That's amazing. Possibly the cleverest thing I've ever seen on XKCD, and I don't say that lightly.
What a fun tool, and I was embarrassingly proud to finally solve my first section!
Wow, yours looks much more difficult than mine. I just had red balls coming out on top and having to leave at the bottom. Guess I'll try another one.
Same for me. I was wondering if there is another difficulty or so
Yeah, it was really tricky, I had to start again like 5 times!. Then the next one was like you describe, just one colour, one entrance at the top one exit at the bottom :-)
That's my submission. Balls get separated by sword and this anti-gravitational thingy
ah, genius probabilistic sorting!
I solved one. Kinda sorta. It didn't work consistently, but it worked well enough to count apparently.
Then I reloaded and got this?
Reload again and get a 4 color criss-cross sorter T.T
It's being DDOSed. Too many users. Too many submits. The rendering code is light enough on the server that it still works (most of the work is client side, the sever just serves a bunch of json files), but the submitting code definitely crashes.
I remember XKCD #1. I just did the math in my head and it’s been ~20 years. Fuck I’m old.
That was FUN!
Anyone remember The Incredible Machine game from the 90s?
Cool, but it's now impossible to submit anything, as the server is being DDOS'd. Not out of malice, mind you, there are just too many geeks out there, and this is a Sunday...
Still, one can read the titles of the already posted rooms with:
env URL=https://incredible.xkcd.com \
curl -SsL $URL/machine/current \
| jq .grid[][] | grep -v '^null$' | tr -d '"' \
| while read uuid; do printf '%s: ' "$uuid"; \
curl -SsL $URL/folio/$uuid \
| jq .blueprint.title; done
(Useful to find out if your room made it to the public set)
Quite an enjoyable one. I just wish it were possible to re-visit past machines you made.
It should be, but the server is overloaded.
This is fun! Unfortunately it's always overwritten by someone else. I guess too many people playing at the same time?