Saturday!

https://youtu.be/6yYjZg5bhAs

Tomorrow Corporation is the company that brought us Little Inferno. In that game, you explored the joys of buying things and setting them on fire. (Still recommended, by the way.)

Well, they’ve recently released another game. “Human Resource Machine”.

In this one, you write simple programs. Take this from the inbox and place it in the outbox. Maybe perform an operation or two on it somewhere in between. The challenge of the game not only comes from stuff like “how do I add these two numbers together…” but “how can I crunch these numbers using the fewest commands?” or “how can I crunch these numbers using the fewest steps?” (And the solution to those last two questions might involve two different formulae entirely.)

It’s one of those games that makes you feel smart, then dumb, then smart again, then dumb again. This will go on for a while, actually. (A really fun series of problems was to take an input number and then triple it using only the add function. Then to take a number and octuple it using only the addition function. Then to tetracontuple it using only the addition function.)

If you’re a programmer, you probably get enough of this crap at work… but if you enjoy doing math in your head for light enjoyment, the problems are discrete and you can finish one, walk away, then sit down to work out another.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission)