For those of you who survived the immense effort required to solve the standard Puzzle DA :-) :-) PUZZLE II now offers a further level of challenge.
To increase the number of hours you'll probably spend moving 11 rectangles around anyway, PUZZLE II counts the number of moves and providess a 400-level undo/redo feature: Finding *a* solution is one thing, but the other is to minimize the number of moves…
I saw this puzzle once on a UN*X workstation, could not solve it then and forgot about it for years. When I started programming the MAC recently, I remembered this puzzle as a nice subject for first experiments with Toolbox, MPW, and ObjectPascal (the puzzle parts are implemented as objects !). I am not absolutely sure if the PUZZLE II layout is 100% equal to the UN*X original, but it shares as least two properties of the latter: It is not trivial to solve (at least for simple-minded people like me :-) and it *can* be solved. However, the minimum number of moves required is absolutely unknown to me.
Because I don't want to be responsible when you play PUZZLE II all night and fall asleep at work the next day, PUZZLE II *can* save the game status together with the entire undo buffer and load it sometimes later. If you don't *want* to do that, it's your fault :-)
To find out what to do at all, select the "About PUZZLE II..." item in the apple menu. Unlike the simple puzzle DA, you have to drag the rectangles rather than just clicking them. Note also that the game status gets lost if you close the window or quit PUZZLE II, so, if you want to save the game, you have to do it explicitly (Save or Save As…)
PUZZLE II is public domain and may be redistributed as long as no fee is asked for it, so you don't owe me anything.
However, I'd enjoy receiving your favorite solution of PUZZLE II (binhexed) in my email. If there is interest, I'll post a list of the best results later.
Please direct bug lists, solution files, suggestions and flames about whatever part of this posting you dislike to my email address. Thank you !
