Movie of solving Richard's Puzzle

As discussed in more detail on this page, we see the steps that a computer code takes, to solve the puzzle posed by Richard Kass.

The puzzle as posed:
Solving the puzzle: (hit RELOAD to restart)

The movie is supposed to play at 10 frames/sec. For 7550 frames, then, it takes about 12.5 minutes.

I am aware that there are "color glitches." See below.

The solution:


I'm a real hack, so the "movie" is an animated gif made as follows:

  1. Run MakePawMovie (code in this directory), redirecting stdout to a file which becomes a giant paw kumac file. (See here for visualization details).
    This makes some giant files you can peruse here if you like.
  2. running these macros in paw, generates 7550 .gif file, which are the Frames of the movie. You can see them all here if you want.
  3. Finally, using the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (gimp), I open all those files as "layers" and save it as a big .gif file.

Now then, it is impressive that gimp can do this! However, you will see sometimes, especially as the movie wears on, that the colors get screwed up. There are "blue squares" on the checkerboard, and later on there are grey ones. The colors on the original .gif files are fine, but they get screwed up by gimp (or my use of gimp) somehow. But anyway, you can still see what's happenning.

So, where's my $5.00?


lisa@mps.ohio-state.edu