For my 40th birthday party, I had an event in the style of Caltech's Ditch Day - a series of adventures and puzzles. Think of an escape room, except not localized to one room. (My house, my parents' house, the neighborhood - I even buried a plastic film canister in the nearby park for the players to dig up, but a squirrel got to it first!)
A few of the puzzles involved a little bit of software, which is preserved here.
In the ultron directory is a small Python application that presents a UI. This was the players' main point of
interaction with this puzzle set, and appeared on the main screen in my office.
One of the puzzles gave each player their own custom Wordle to solve! I used the open source TypeScript Wordle clone at yyx990803/vue-wordle with gratitude, and kept it in the top-level of this repository as well. I made several edits to allow custom success messages (which were then used in the puzzle solution in Ultron.py!)
I base64 encoded the parameters for the custom word for each player as well as the success message so they weren't just obviously present in the URL.
- Install nvm-windows
- Open a command line as the administrator, and
nvm install 18.6.0thennvm use 18.6.0 - Run
npm install - Run
npm run dev
I created a few Windows batch scripts to make it easy to launch this. I also created a small Windows batch script that polled for the existence of a file on the I:\ drive to detect when a USB drive had been plugged in, and then launched Ultron.py!
Another of the puzzles was based on the board game "Ricochet Robots" - a puzzle where you can move robots around on a board until they bump into a wall or each other. To create fun and fair puzzles, there were several constraints: I wanted each puzzle to have a unique shortest solution that took 4 or 5 moves. So, I wrote this utility in Kotlin to generate random puzzles, to solve puzzles, and to find ones that matched my desired constraints. (This program wasn't used during the event itself, just to generate puzzles printed out and then solved by hand!)