Map of the Informatique

(working title)

Consider the cryptogram: It is a message written in the English alphabet, representing English text, but you are left to figure out how the characters have been remapped (A is really E, B is really Z, etc).

The idea of "Map of the Informatique" is to provide the same kind of puzzle, but with a list of cardinal directions substituted for English text. With this approach, the player can infer whether a potential translation is correct by attempting to use it to navigate through a space. These paths will be quite straightforward, maze solving is not the goal. The player is first shown several correct paths and directions for them encoded the same way, which can be used to test the interpretation. The final challenge for an encoding will consist of only the directions, and a path that must be walked with no feedback but "right/wrong" at each step.

The real depth of the game comes from the core user interface; rather than requiring the player to work out solutions on paper and do the translation by hand, we "provide help" in the form of a programmable system, composed of a chain of maps, which the user must configure to perform the translation automatically.

Initially it is expected that the player will find this more hindrance than help, especially with the first few levels containing trivially obvious mappings, but it has two purposes.

1. It relieves the tedium of walking these fairly uninteresting paths.
2. It enables the mappings to become very complex, ultimately this is the interesting part of the game.

Above is very simple example showing an early level, the given mapping is backwards! The player's task would be to construct the mechanism on the right.

There are several possibilities for the world and story, and they keep changing with ideas about how the game ought to work.

The reader is invited to consider some of the following possible mappings:

• 1-to-1 (as shown above)
• 1-to-{0,1} (to remove symbols from the stream)
• 2-to-1 (to decode symbol pairs into the cardinal directions
• 1-to-2 (each symbol may stand for multiple moves)
• 2-to-1 parallel (evaluates pairs of inputs received simultaneously, allows many forms of logic gate)

• 0 to up, 1 to right (as shown above)
• the reverse (1 up, 0 right)
• every other symbol is junk (serial 2-to-1 with "don't care" on one input
• every pair of symbols indicates one of 4 directions
• every pair of symbols indicates one of 3 non-backtracking directions (need a way to preserve state)
• pairs of directions that indicate backtracking are to be removed
• any path that crosses itself is to have the loop removed (a much more advanced challenge!)
• And Many Others!

This idea has been simmering for a few years, I considered it in a 2010 blog post, but it has not yet been implemented.

No relation to this blog.