This is a little journal entry on how the puzzle hunt this weekend went. This should probably go on a Flowsheets mailing list, but I don't know how to make one.
On Saturday (March 12), I hosted about 12 people in the lab to do the Panda Magazine bimonthly puzzle hunt. I wanted to give some people Flowsheets to see if it could help in solving some of the puzzles.
One puzzle Flowsheets would have worked well on was the following:
The idea with this puzzle is that you replace the dots with letters to make a word in the dictionary. The first one might be "UPHELD", for example. Unfortunately, when I tried to use Flowsheets to fill in the columns, I discovered that the current version has a pretty serious performance issue which made it basically unusable when looping through OSX's 23,000-word dictionary. I ended up resorting to a tool I knew would work:
For a different puzzle, I tried suggesting that someone use Flowsheets, but they were very resistant and didn't end up using it. I think there is something about the time pressure of puzzle hunts that makes people very resistant to anything they don't already know how to use.
I think if I were to try this again, I would give out a version of Flowsheets about a week before the event, possibly bundled with some useful puzzle-solving utilities and some suggestions about how to play around with it.
I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get to observe anyone else using Flowsheets, but even observing my own experience I can already to pinpoint several weaknesses in both the design and implementation of the current version and have some hints for how to make the experience better.
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On Monday March 15, I gave a little demo to the Dynamic group and rewrote one of the scripts I made during the puzzle hunt from scratch. Here it is:
The script basically converts several old video game titles into sums based on a A=1,B=2,C=3 mapping. Since I didn't really practice making the script before the demo, I felt like it went pretty dismally, but that's okay. I think some of those difficulties are honest difficulties with using Flowsheets!
In the screenshot, you can see one of my favorite features so far. Anything with the words "manually edited" underneath means I created a temporary what-if scenario by editing what came out of the computation. I'm still trying to figure out a clear visual convention to indicate boxes that are in this state. I said during the demo that I thought it felt really natural to just reach in and temporarily change values. In fact, during the demo, someone suggested using it to fix a bug with a curly quote in DRAGON'S LAIR, and that worked out marvelously.
I also said during the demo that I'd be happy to help anyone set it up on their computer if they wanted. The code repository is on our Gitlab and we're using the issue tracker to keep track of bugs and features.
I'd also be really happy if anyone wanted to send me scripts they've written that I could recreate in Flowsheets! I'm keeping a big (physical) notebook of all the scripts I've written, both in Python and Flowsheets as an archive of raw material.
Going forward, I'll probably be giving more regular updates on the progress we're making. I'm still not exactly sure how that's going to work, but we'll figure it out.