Turing Tumble Community

Puzzle 46 Solution - Flip bits in order

Hello TT Community and welcome to my first post.

I want to share a solution to puzzle 46 that flips the bits in order from left to right even though it was not a requirement of the puzzle. The trick here was the getting the third bit to kick off the processing on the red side. I used gear bits (the most fun part I think!) to set the state of the rightmost gear bit. The issue was that if bit one was zero, it would flip the second gear bit, so three were required which were set up so that bit one and bit two always hit the first two gear bits leaving the third gear bit in position to dump the next ball to hit it to the red side. It uses a few extra pieces (38 including the starter pieces) than the book solution.

The solution screen shot is from the Jesse Crossen TT simulator.

Puzzle46Solved

Great job! I especially like how you used the same counting device for both sides. I came up with a few in-order solutions (also with gear bits on the bottom row), but I wasn’t able to get the part count as low as yours:

35 Parts - A clean solution, but unfortunately it doesn’t work on a real board because the first blue ball gets jammed between the leftmost gear bit and the side of the board when Bit 1 (the leftmost bit) starts in position shown. One fix would be to flip Bit 2 then Bit 1, but of course that breaks the order. Another cool thing about this solution is that only one adjustment at most is needed between runs: only the gear bits have a chance to end up flipped from how they started.

40 Parts - More complicated than the above solution, but it does work on a real board. One or two adjustments will be required between runs.

Ah, I just realized your solution can be reduced to 35 parts:

https://lodev.org/jstumble/?board=rrelelererfleleererf1e1ee1l1relxril11111agagarrlr_8_8

2024