{"id":6373,"date":"2020-10-29T13:53:36","date_gmt":"2020-10-29T20:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=6373"},"modified":"2020-10-29T13:53:36","modified_gmt":"2020-10-29T20:53:36","slug":"ifcomp-2020-sheep-crossing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/6373","title":{"rendered":"IFComp 2020: Sheep Crossing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>OK so you have to bring a cabbage, a sheep, and for some reason a bear to your grandmother, who lives on the other side of a river, and there&#8217;s boat but you can only bring yes it&#8217;s that one. The only complication here beyond the classic brain-teaser is that the sheep isn&#8217;t completely compliant.<\/p>\n<p>To an old-timer like me, this game immediately brings to mind <a href=\"\/stack\/archives\/232\"><em>Fox, Fowl, and Feed<\/em><\/a> from the 2007 Comp (the very first Comp to be covered in this blog!), which does exactly the same thing in considerably more depth. I&#8217;m assuming that the author wasn&#8217;t aware that the idea had been done before &#8212; which is fair, it&#8217;s not a reasonable thing to expect people to know! I&#8217;ll say this much for the comparison: <em>Sheep Crossing<\/em> is more reasonably completable. The solution to <em>FF&amp;F<\/em> involved ripping a hole in the grain sack so you could get some grain to feed the goose, which violated the explicit instructions that all three things be delivered intact. <em>Sheep Crossing<\/em> does no such thing. On the other hand, it also has only one puzzle, other than the classic one, which hardly counts as a puzzle any more.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a suggestion for any future authors of river-crossing-puzzle-based IF: Why not use a different river-crossing puzzle? Adapt the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Missionaries_and_cannibals_problem\">Missionaries and Cannibals problem<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/rainton.com\/fun\/puzzles\/?page=flashlight\">the Flashlight puzzle<\/a> or something. Heck, come up with your own original variant. I guess this would change the nature of the game, make it less of a commentary on a ubiquitously-known folk puzzle. So ignore this suggestion if you want. Just be aware that there are other similar puzzles out there that haven&#8217;t been given the IF treatment yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OK so you have to bring a cabbage, a sheep, and for some reason a bear to your grandmother, who lives on the other side of a river, and there&#8217;s boat but you can only bring yes it&#8217;s that one. The only complication here beyond the classic brain-teaser is that the sheep isn&#8217;t completely compliant. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[84,53,682],"class_list":["post-6373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2020"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6374,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6373\/revisions\/6374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}