The game has never had a board you simply clear out, and the request for one
turned out to need a construction of its own rather than a denser deep lock.
Filling cells at random can never work: a packed board has nothing that can
move — measured over forty random fills of a 37-cell board, zero pieces free in
all six orientations, every time, because a piece steps to the next cell before
it can leave and on a full board that cell is taken.
So packBoard builds backwards. Start empty, add only a piece that could leave
right now, and the placement order reversed is a removal order — solvability
becomes a property of the construction. Which cell to fill next decides
everything: at random it stalls near half, while filling the most constrained
cell first takes a 19-cell interior to 96% and fills it outright.
The rim is deliberately empty. Those pieces leave first and ask nothing, and
clearing from the rim inward gives a packed board its own difficulty curve
inside one level — the outer cells read easily, and it tightens as it opens.
Two things were tried against the ceiling and failed, and are recorded as such:
depth-first backtracking made it worse on both counts (65-78% filled against
greedy's 89%, at 2000-3000 seconds a board) because recomputing every cell's
legal directions per node spends the budget three levels deep. And the audit's
dead-turn gate could not be trusted here at all — on a packed board its breadth
search truncates, so it certified levels the rule bot then walked through three
blind turns in a row. The pool is filtered by playing it instead: a full pass
takes one second and does not lie.
The campaign is 32 packed levels to 18 deep locks, alternating, with the closing
six at a completely full interior. Same rule bot, both editions: worst blind
streak 1 either way, dead taps zero, and half again as much to do per level.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A crowded board and a deep lock cannot be the same level — at five turns with
eight pieces per orientation, 16 of 18 candidates fail the release gate, because
pieces packed in leave no room for a turn to open two of them. So the campaign
alternates the two instead of ramping one: crowded stretches for the pleasure of
clearing a full board, deep stretches as the variation between them, and the
last four are the fullest boards in the set.
24 crowded, 14 deep, 12 sparse-and-shallow to open on. Density climbs across the
crowded stretches (0.36 → 0.40 → 0.42 → 0.44) since that is the axis left once
depth is spoken for.
select-50 takes --id and --name so this edition is built beside the first rather
than over it; the fifty already played stay exactly as they are.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
trackShape moves the two drawing measurements into src so the sweep, the pool
build, the selector and the gallery share one definition. They are one property
seen twice: a chord joining opposite ports is a straight line, and two of those
in a cell always cross, which is why the filler that paired leftovers straight
across produced a board that is both all-straight and all-crossings.
Crossings per cell is now a gate at 1.0. Bending the leftover ports alone takes
the median from 2.36 to 0.93, so the gate costs a third of the candidates rather
than most of them, and it is the difference the boards were described by.
Selection gains --plan, an ordered list of segments each naming how many levels
it wants and of what kind. Depth quotas cannot express the shape this campaign
needs, because the two good things pull against each other: a crowded board
clears beautifully and caps at three turns, while a deep lock needs room and so
stays sparse — at five turns and eight pieces per orientation, 16 of 18
candidates fail the release gate. Sorting by depth would file every crowded
level first and every deep one last; segments alternate them deliberately, and a
plan is left in the order it was written rather than re-sorted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 2 rated 16 runs a 3 and 84 a 2, which is too little spread to rank levels
by — but enough to ask what the 3s had in common. Contrast: 32.6 against 20.5,
a 59% gap and by far the largest of any feature. Rotation depth came second at
+1.2 turns. Board size and longest route ran the *other* way: the levels rated
harder were slightly smaller with shorter routes, which is what the design brief
has said all along — 难是难在用户无法一下子判断, not in how much board there is.
So within a depth, picking evenly across the ranked slice was diluting the one
thing the brief calls the point of the game. The depth quota already supplies
the difficulty range; inside a depth there is nothing to spread for, so it takes
the highest-contrast levels instead.
Taken alone that collapses the route grammars — two families filled 36 of the
50 — so the family cap comes down to 0.26. The pair beats the shipped round on
both axes rather than trading one for the other: contrast 14.8 / 22.0 / 27.9 →
15.2 / 24.9 / 28.6, families {18,12,8,2,10} → {13,13,5,9,10}. Same rule bot,
mechanics unchanged: worst blind streak still 1, dead taps still 0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 1 played all fifty levels and came back with the mechanics clean and one
complaint repeated across the reports: 短暂以为转错了方向 — a turn that changed
nothing. That one is mechanical rather than perceptual, so it can be gated.
The first attempt gated `doubleDead`, and it was wrong. That counts dead states,
which scales with the state space: three-turn levels have ~187 reachable stuck
states and five-turn ones ~739, so a raw count made deep levels look eight times
worse when the rate is 2% against 5%. It would have erased every level past
three turns — the opposite of the brief, where turning is the signature and is
not to be rationed. The gate is `maxDeadTurns`, the longest run of turns before
something opens, at 1: one beat of suspense, then a release. Eleven of the fifty
shipped at 2.
Selection could not express the curve either. Spreading picks evenly over the
ranked pool returns whatever the pool is made of, and the pool is 88%
three-turn, so no weighting moved the distribution off {3: 46}. A quota per
depth states the curve outright, deepest first so the scarce end picks before a
family cap is spent on levels the shallow end has hundreds of.
Same rule bot, both sets: blind rotations 0.24 → 0.12, worst blind streak 4 → 1,
decisions unchanged at 10.3. The same amount to do, half the wasted motion.
Rotation now runs 1.8 / 3.0 / 4.1 across the bands against 1.8 / 3.0 / 3.5.
Verdicts are keyed by the board rather than by its id, because a reselect
re-issues ids from the ordinal and `c50-01-v05` is not the same board before and
after — the review sheet was one reselect away from printing one level's verdict
under another's thumbnail.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The deep-lock construction cannot go below three turns, so it cannot supply an
opening band — every level it makes lands mid-difficulty and the curve comes
out flat. harvest-easy pulls the shallow end from the shipped v0.5 set, but
only the 3% of it that holds up: 568 of 1000 need no rotation at all and 51
more are clearable by tapping at random, which is what the monkey threshold is
for. 33 levels survive, at one and two turns.
select-50 scores candidates on mechanical features only, spreads the pick
evenly across that range, and caps any one route grammar at 36% so the campaign
cannot quietly become one template repeated — the shipped 1000 turned out to be
thirty. Weights are a flag, so refitting them from a round of agent ratings is
a re-run rather than an edit.
The result is a curve rather than a plateau: difficulty score 3.85 / 6.24 /
7.60 across the three bands, rotations 1.8 / 3.0 / 3.5, and every level keeps
three or more opening choices with a show of at least a second.
The 50 register as a playable campaign edition, so review happens in the real
game; docs/review-50.html is the handover sheet, one card per level with the
opening position drawn from the solver rather than sketched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
