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That was fun to figure out

I thought I had to keep the dog and rabbits separate, which really stumped me for a bit.

It would be neat if the conditional statements emphasized and deemphasized based on whether their condition was currently met.

I like the puzzle! Too much flashing at the end there, either tone it down or put an epilepsy warning on it.

It took a while, but I got it!

It's like the Wolf, goat and cabbage problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf,_goat_and_cabbage_problem

Great game, more levels and maybe a countdown for animals that will eat other animals (and end the game) if they are left on the same pad for too long.

Cool puzzle and nice art. Too much flashing at the end. Concept reminds me of the indie game Baba is you: https://hempuli.com/baba/

I figured it was conrad barski the moment i saw the art. I like that style.

Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg

I have to say the fact that I was able to figure out how the puzzle worked - what I was meant to do - with no instructions in about 60 seconds is a good sign.

I'm also immediately kind of addicted to this....I really like it.

The one thing that annoys me is that I can't see what a symbol is if the dog/bunny is on it because it's covered up. It's hard to remember when there's so many. Some transparency or slight design adjustment would fix this easily.

I'm convinced there is only one way to solve this: Write a program to unroll the constrained state transition diagram into an unconditional state transition diagram and find the shortest path. The unrolled version would still be pretty small so you can just iterate over it.

I love it. Fantastic.

Can you think of a way to re formulate the puzzle so that you can express the rules without words?

Also, the dog / rabbit dynamic (as used in the classic dog/duck/grain river crossing puzzle) made me think that I had to chase the rabbits with dog, or that dogs and rabbits couldn’t share a node. Different animals might be better — rabbit and mouse, perhaps? Or even different coloured rabbits and different coloured carrots?

The words thing though — that’s what you should work on next, I think. Good puzzles like this are word-free in the puzzle itself (Stephen’s sausage roll, English country tune).

It would take this puzzle from great to excellent. Good luck. More please!

Yes you did. One of these a day, please. I really like the hand-drawn / doodled style.. it disarmed me, which was good because solving this required me to be patient and to unwire my brain a little

Looks excellent!

Not sure if it’s an issue on iPhone or my IQ, but I can’t figure out what the rules are. I highlight an animal but can’t move it on what seems a bidirectional edge (no nodes light up). But sometimes can. I assume that should work always but it’s not for me.

Also initially assumed I had to keep them separate, but comments here said no.

2. Make a daily one with a countdown to tomorrows one.

3. Profit.

It took me a moment to understand what the constraints meant, which says more about how tired I am than it says about the design, which is great! I don’t want to minimize the cleverness of the puzzle design, but I think it’s a visualization of a finite state machine. Not a novel challenge but a clever way to display it for sure.

Please make that blinking after winning less... epileptic.

Feedback:

1. It was good enough that I finished. This is success! Good job!

2. It took me too long to realize characters could occupy the same space, and the game doesn't draw characters occupying the same space very well.

3. The flashing lights at the end are too fast, slow them way down and it will still look good. You'll probably only have to change a number in your code.

It's beautiful! Looks like the optimal solution is 26 steps: https://github.com/polkerty/dog-bunny-puzzle-solver

On Firefox for android when you solve it (dog at the top, both rabbits at the bottom left) nothing happens. Other than that it's really nice!

My two cents:

1. Like other people I found the UX a bit confusing (figuring out that two animals can occupy the same spot, picking which one of them to move etc.)

2. This one seems hard for a first level, if it's addressed to a general audience. Even figuring out that some edges are directed is not obvious if you don't know about graphs in advance. You should build a tutorial for non-HN people.

3. Are there other levels?

4. Lights are flashing way too fast at the end. A text message would also be nice.

Otherwise a great job! Playable and fun once you get into it. Would totally play again :D

That was a lot of fun. Easy to figure out what the challenge was. Then puzzling, challenging gameplay and a satisfying conclusion in, I don't know, 15 minutes or so. Good work, well done, hope you do well with this.

The labels as required preconditions take a moment to figure out, but I found it satisfying to do so.

I'm a sucker for graph and topology puzzles, so this was very enjoyable to me. I loved that you could clearly sense progress mounting with each step.

The flashing lights at the end could use a bit of calming down though.

Fantastic prototype, is what this smells like : p

This puzzle is so cool because it revolves around casual graphs in classical planning problem! One can use heuristics based search to come up with optimal solutions. I really like this innovative approach to the design.

However, one edge from house to tree wasn't clear at first because, I thought of it as logical or while it was about logical and. Other than that, pretty awesome work!!

Very enjoyable and well done, but not "new". This effectively the same as push maze, with non contiguous rule sets.

Hi! I enjoyed the puzzle and I liked how puzzle itself explains every rule within itself. :)

I wrote an automatic solver for the puzzle in Scala and open-sourced in GitHub. : https://github.com/yusungsim/dogbunnysolver Check it out!

Fun implementation. It’s isomorphic to a wide range of problems that have been used for centuries that are all isomorphic to constrained state search. The fact that the graph is explicit here makes the problem way easier. (One you may be familiar with that seems very similar is the parking problem where by sliding around the cars they (un)block one another. None of this is to take away from the fun setting and implementation. Just that it’s not a new type of problem, although it seems to be a fun new instance of a common type of problem.

(author here)

Great feedback! Yes, I am the "Land of Lisp" guy

Sorry about the potential epilepsy trigger- that was the fastest way I could think of to code a quick "reward effect", I will do something different in the next version. I didn't really expect anyone to care enough to solve the puzzle lol.

Now that I know people like the puzzle, I will build out the website and post regular puzzles, follow my Twitter @lisperati for updates.

I really like the whole concept and execution!

I like the lack of instructions, it makes it fun to explore the rules. In fact, unique rules per game might be interesting to discover.

The UI is perfect, keep it simple and focused on play. Though, I agree with other comments that the final flashing lights should be slower.

A move count and leader board for time to complete and fewest moves to complete would make this social-ish.

Maybe hints for harder puzzles?

I could see this going a long way, so many variations to explore!

Took 30 seconds to figure out what to do and then a minute to solve it. This was really good. Like many have pointed out, it takes a few seconds to figure out what is where and remember what symbol is under the animal but if this was a quick prototype, it's really good. Thanks for sharing it with us "Land of Lisp" guy.

Feedback: add restart button so I don't have to reload the page when I get stuck.

Great game!!

I shared it with my wife because she likes puzzles. It took her about a minute to figure out how the game worked. Once she knew what to do she how do play - she was done in under a minute and said it was fun.

Nice work! Any feedback I would give is in other comments.

Once you get it, it's one of those games that give good vibes.

Fun! UI complaint: the animals block the objects so you can't easily see what they're on, which is annoying. Maybe shrink the animals a bit more, use a 3d effect, or add an option to make them partially transparent. Or just make them sit next to the obj instead of actually on top.

Edit: also, I expected OR rather than AND on the double constraint

I feel like I've seen this in a Professor Layton game before. Just not laid out like this of course

Older analogues exists, but not exactly in this form.

Two puzzles from Logical Adventure of the Zoombinis are very close, though.

The first is Captain Cajun’s ferryboat, which you can see at https://youtu.be/_JlMcs_2xes. The constraint is that all zoombinis you seat on the boat must share at least one trait with at least one of their neighbors. It doesn’t really impose spatial dependencies of movement like your puzzle does though.

For one that does, but by taking on a cartesian grid, you can look to Bubblewonder abyss https://youtu.be/vx1yFKVdq9o, which on its hardest difficulty adds many, many rules to moving between nodes based on traits, plus re-use toggles (so if a node is visited twice, it goes two different places, “capture” triggers of glowing colored particles that holds one Zoombini captive, and a “release” button that lets it go.

When I was young, I had a book of mazes-with-rules[1]. This would have fit right in! There were definitely mazes that involved multiple entrants into the maze, and rules governing whether edges were allowed to be taken.

Thanks for unlocking an ancient memory. I'll have to see if I can track down my old copy of this book.

[1] https://www.logicmazes.com/super.html

How do you generate levels or at least validate they’re solvable?

This is a fun puzzle! Great job.

It took me a minute to figure out the rules, but I was able to with some experimentation. I think the lack of explicit instructions adds to the charm.

There’s lots of other elements you could add to these puzzles to spice them up, eg, wolves that try to eat the rabbits, or streets which are blocked at a certain frequency by cars.

Some feedback: - needs a reset button! And maybe a sad-rabbit ‘you failed’ notification if you get stuck. - it already looks good, some cute animations would go a long way if you decide to work on the presentation - you could make it a little more obvious what moves are available when you pick up a dog/rabbit, the shift from white to blue didn’t always ‘grab’ my eye and sometimes I didn’t notice a move was available. Again, a simple animation would help - overall I like the minimalism though, so I don’t think you need to go overboard with visual improvements :)

When two of something are on the same tile, I think you need a different image - or to add some kind of stacking visual or something

I liked the fact it didnt count steps and has no score. More casual that way.

Idea: rabbit grab an object (e.g. a key) and needs it to reach a cell.

Love it! I refer to these kinds of puzzles as "state mazes", but maybe that's not quite the right term. Many variations are explored in "logic maze" books like Mad Mazes (https://smile.amazon.com/Mad-Mazes-Intriguing-Twisters-Puzzl...). Most of them use simpler mechanics and look more like mazes, but some toward the end start looking like your puzzle.

Fun, but alas not new: conditional movement of entities through a graph towards a win-state configuration is a decades-old staple of game puzzles. For someone with the relevant experience, less than 90s to clear.

I did like the presentation, however! I think it has potential for a series of escalating difficulty.

Fun puzzle. Nice flashing lights as a reward

Prompted by a question on Twitter: it turns out that the puzzle is also NP-complete:

https://www.neeldhara.blog/posts/dogs-bunny-puzzle/

Super fun game solved it in < 5 min. Would love to have more levels!

You might consider updating the meta tag that handles the Open Graph text preview image. Right now the text preview image of your website on an iPhone is the React logo.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2444...

This was great. I experienced much of the name confusion as other people but it only lasted a minute or two so not a problem worth solving imho.

Nothing happened when I reached the win condition though. Shrug.

Really fun to play! Reminded me of CodeMaster [0]

[0] https://www.thinkfun.com/products/code-master/

If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy Heroes of Sokoban: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of...

Note: it doesn’t work on mobile.

(Once you beat it, google Heroes of Sokoban 2 and 3 for more levels)

Simply put, I think it’s fun! I’d love to see a move counter, to compare with an optimal solution.

Work it into a randomly generated daily puzzle and you might have something!

This is pretty cool! Conceptually it's pretty similar to a classic Mac game I remember from the 90s called The Tinies. The goal is to get each "Tiny" creature to a bed of the same color.

Where it gets complicated is that each creature will in a straight line move up, down, left, or right as far as they can until they hit a wall. You can't stop in the middle of the floor and turn, although there are arrows on the floor that will redirect them, and even teleport pads. Each tiny also acts as an obstacle to other tinies, so you can place them in a particular location to force another tiny to stop short so they can be moved in a different direction some distance from a wall (similar to your conditional graph edges).

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3493-the-tinies

Throwing in a note of appreciation here. Had friends over to dinner last night at our place and at close to midnight a fun debate broke out about puzzles like wordle, and quordle and the like. I shared this URL with my friends and said “no instructions, you just got to do it. All I will say is that it can be done”

It was so funny to suddenly go from noisy bunch of us to each person quietly studying the problem followed by the occasional “wth??”

They all want to know if this is going to be a daily thing now.

The only question mark we have is whether the game will be fun on a regular basis since so much of the fun (and satisfaction) actually came from figuring out the rules of the game in the first place :D

This was a lot of fun! Please make more levels and post them here! My main complaint is the 2-way path on the left (Somebody at Bone/Somebody at Flower), I couldn't tell which restraint was for which direction, a simple arrow should fix this.

Good fun, but not intuitive for people who drive on the left-hand side of the road (the somebody at bone/somebody at flower path assumes right-hand drive). Occupying the same space also feels wrong - I didn't even try this until both bunnies had to go onto the carrot.

So much fun! It'll be nicer to highlight the paths which are "available" given the criteria. It could be only enabled when you start dragging an entity

Can't wait for regular puzzles like this!! This was awesome! From a technical perspective, I'm wondering if there are some kind of generative procedures that can generate "solvable" graphs? Very curious about it :) Also how to get the solution from a previously generated graph although that might be simply some DFS/BFS across several "start" nodes where the search stops once all the target conditions are met. Still very interested though and amazing job!!

I think I broke it. Both rabbits at house, dog at ship. And nobody can move anywhere.

Edit: seems like there are quite a few more situations like that. I am just gonna consider it "You Lose" -- when you are forced to refresh the page.

I would classify this problem as a multi agent path finding problem on a directed graph with conditional edges.

I like the UI design of this page, but I often forget what the symbol under the rabbit or dog is, it would be nice if it could be displayed, just a small question

Simple concept executed well - got hooked into it straight away. Would be cool if you could figure out a way of automatically generating more, then you could show a different one every day like Wordle.

Cost me 10 min to solve the puzzle. Quite an enjoyable game! My only feedback is to highlight the condition which blocks the path on the UI.