Recapping the 2023 Opus Magnum Tournament

Welcome back! It’s time to celebrate the 5th annual Opus Magnum tournament, which concluded on March 26th, 2023. As in the previous recap, we will first cover the overall structure and changes from previous years. Then we will look at the new submitters, and showcase a few of their solutions. Then we will look at the winning solutions to several of the puzzles. We’ll list the winning players and show the pretty graph of all points awarded. Finally, in a separate post coming soon, we will dive deep into Habitability Detector, the grand finale of the tournament.

Tournament website

If you want to follow along for any future events, including the lower-stakes weeklies that begin in a few months, the place to be is http://events.critelli.technology/. This website, built by panic, keeps evolving to meet the needs of events. This year, it had:

• A tournament intro post
• Every puzzle, including instructions on how to download the puzzle and submit solutions
• The metrics to optimize for (two metrics, with the expectation that competitors submit separate solutions for each)
• Explanations as needed
• Flavor text
• An integrated simulator “omsim” that would verify and score your solution and show results during the submission process
• A space for users to write notes about their submissions when submitting
• Dedicated lore posts!

If you are interested in fantasy storytelling, even if intentionally somewhat vague, I definitely recommend reading through the 2023 Opus Magnum tournament’s flavor text and extra posts. The general theme is that the world where the characters live has become inhospitable (unclear whether solely as a result of alchemy, or other factors), and they’re trying to escape to a new world.

Organization

panic, who we already have to thank for the website, the omsim library, and various tools featured in previous blog posts like the ELU art tool, was also the host of this tournament. Accompanying him were playtesters Haxton, geco, ShadowCluster, and Syx. In panic’s words, these four helped by “making sure that my puzzles were not completely ridiculous, or at least, telling me when they were ridiculous, so that I could make the decision to publish them anyway.”

There were 8 such puzzles, each with 2 metrics. They were roughly sorted in increasing ridiculousness. The first few puzzles were very approachable, and by the end it was difficult to even solve the puzzle let alone optimize it. They also accompanied the lore quite well, particularly the final 3 puzzles.

Each puzzle was released one week after the previous, with 9 days to work on it (9 days to cover two weekends, also allowing players to focus on either of two different puzzles during the weekends). There were two exceptions to this schedule – a break week in the middle and an extra week for the final puzzle. I think this structure is good, because people get to have a little breather and still participate fully for two and a half months.

The amount of effort needed to participate was pretty low – just solve the puzzles and send in your solution! The amount of effort needed to be competitive, however, was very high. Certain weeks, most of the top solves were the results of tens of hours of effort by a player.

Scoring

New formula for rank points

Aware of some problems with the old scoring system, panic changed to a new one this year. The running score which determines global standings, is now a fixed number of points for each rank. Get first place, 10 points. Get second, 9.677. Third, 9.375. The formula was 300 / (rank + 29), so it didn’t matter how many people submitted.

I think this is a great system, especially compared to how it used to be. Previously, rank points depended on how many people submitted. If you had 200 people, then 100th place gets half points. But if you have only 10 people, then 5th place now gets half points. As the puzzles got harder and fewer people sent in solutions, the points difference between nearby rankings grew, even when the consistent submitters fighting for the top spots remained the same. This effectively gave more weight to the harder puzzles. Worth noting, this absolutely played in my favor.. but it wasn’t the best design for scoring.

Eliminate metric points

The rank point problem was somewhat mitigated in previous Opus Magnum tournaments by having two parts to your score. Only half of your score came from rank points. The other half came from “metric points”.

In order to prevent people getting next to no points for ending up near the bottom, the scoring system would consider the metric itself (e.g. cost), and award points inversely scaled to the winner’s score in the same. If you used 100g to solve the puzzle, and the winner used 80g, you would get 80% of the available metric points no matter where you ranked.

Metric points did make participation more rewarding, but they also tended to weight puzzles lower when the primary metric was easier to match. For example, a cost or area puzzle will typically be decided by tiebreakers, because almost everyone will achieve one of the same few low cost values. So, the handful of top players will all get those metric points. Conversely, a sum or TI metric will have a much more substantial difference between the good and great scores. As a result, these are the metrics where big point movements were decided. (Yet another way the old scoring system played in my favor, it cared more about the metrics I am more interested in!)

Now, with rank points fixed, metric points could go away completely. And panic was free to pick more creative metrics, which may rely more or less heavily on tiebreakers, free of concern. If you could sort players, you could score them.

In what follows, there will be some weird metrics. I’ll explain them as they come up.

New player showcase

As before, I’ll give a shout out to some of our new players. In this tournament, there were 67 total submitters. Of those, 44 submitted to at least half of the weeks, and 25 submitted every single week. Several of them were participating in their first Opus Magnum tournament, and I’ll share a few submissions (in no particular order) that stood out which were sent in by first time players.

J’ason

J’ason first started chatting in the community discord during the 2022 weeklies, and teamed up with other new players (oh yeah, the weeklies allow teams. These longer form tournaments do not. Worth noting if you’re on the fence about joining).

J’ason described himself as “the first width main” – a fringe metric that requires players to solve within the narrowest possible vertical tube. In general, he has a good sense of humor. In the tournament, he had the very first solution shown to the first puzzle, Self-Pressurizing Gas.

Being displayed first may seem to some a bad thing, because tournament solutions are shown in descending order, with the best and lowest scores last. But, some players do not take the competitive aspect as seriously, and instead tell a story. This design tells the story of getting frustrated with the chiral nature of this puzzle. You see, the dispersion glyph, which turns the input into all 4 elements, can only create one exact arrangement of those elements. Thus, if you find you have built the output’s mirror image, you can’t mirror the machinery to fix it.

In J’ason’s words: “Arm 9 wanted to sue me for giving him the wrong chirality to output. I convinced him that this IS in fact the right chirality and he should just try harder next time. Until he comes to his senses, he will not get paid and 10 and 11 will output in his place.”

In what would amount to be the most competitive Opus Magnum event yet, it was good to remind everyone to have some fun with it. Thanks J’ason.

Daiya Diode

More in line with what the puzzle actually called for, we can look at the following solution from Daiya Diode. The metric here was “lexicographic cycles” (aka LexC), which is a nice generalization of latency. The single most important thing about a LexC solution is when it drops its first output. Ties are then broken by when a solution drops its second output, and so on forever. It’s different from cycles, because every output matters, particularly the first ones.

As for Daiya Diode, they managed to create a solution which output the first product on cycle 9, the earliest possible. Because of an imperfect 2nd output, along with how incredibly competitive this community is, this solution only earned them 25th, but that is still a very commendable debut. I hope they enjoyed the process of working towards a rather unique metric. They stuck around for a few other weeks, including their best finish (11th) in the cost metric for week 3.

Zandorf

Zandorf submitted to the first 4 weeks, and their best placement came in week 4, the polymer puzzle of this tournament.

One metric that isn’t exactly new to the tournaments, but still invented by the community, is sum. Add up cost, cycles, and area, and attempt to make that total as low as possible by finding the tradeoffs between them. An extension of that metric, sum4, includes instructions along with it. In several polymer puzzles of the past, it’s better for sum to do something that requires behaving differently on the first or last loop. Sum4 effectively punishes that behavior due to the fact it requires so many more instructions. What remains are the well behaved, looping solutions.

So, for week 4, Biosteel Filament, panic used sum4 as the metric. Here’s Zandorf’s 18th place solution:

Krissotep

Another new face, Krissotep started playing at the beginning of 2023 and decided to dive right in on the tournament. Most notably, they made a solution for the cabinet puzzle in week 5: Probe Module. These puzzles are far more difficult to get any solution for, so it’s great to see brand new players continue participating even when there is this difficulty spike.

wchpsh

Pronounced identically to the crack of a whip (and yes, the commentary had a lot of fun whenever the opportunity to say wchpsh came up), wchpsh arrived during the 2022 weeklies. 2023 was their first tournament. They had an impressive finish in Probe Module. This puzzle had a brand new metric: period. The period of a solution is how many cycles before the arms all repeat their same programming. It’s similar to instructions, but your score doesn’t get worse by adding more arms as long as they all obey the period.

It’s conjectured that period 3 is sufficient for most puzzles in free space, but in the constrained cabinets, such a thing is likely not possible. At period 4 however, there is a very large possibility space. In the end, 5 people were able to come up with solutions to Probe Module at period 4. One of them (5th via the instructions tiebreaker) was wchpsh.

…yeah. This community has some serious dedication.

In this solution, every arm acts 6 times through its instruction tape before the true board state repeats. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and a tremendous finish for a new participant.

Vordjin

Arriving in week 2, Vordjin started on the puzzle “Waste Reclamation”, which had a height metric. Due to the input and Van Berlo’s wheel both taking 3 height, the challenge was to get all of the rest of the machinery to fit in that height too. The tiebreak was cycles, and Vordin’s solution took 433.

Berlo on track, height-appropriate waste, a fine debut. Vordjin submitted to weeks 2-6.

Pazzaz

Pazzaz showed up late in 2022 and began to reduce cost or cycles for some of the 3 instruction solutions on the leaderboard, continuing a style that Rolamni popularized years earlier. In the tournament, their best finish was on the other metric for Waste Reclamation: trackless instructions.

Instructions and trackless instructions (TI) have very different feels to them, but it is fitting that Pazzaz secured a top 10 finish in this metric. Their 10 instruction solution (slightly modified) is shown below.

This metric had a tiebreaker of area, which is very curious. Of the 18 people to achieve 10 instructions or fewer, only two of them took less than 1000 area to do it, and nobody took less than 500. It’s just too powerful to make use of waste, even in the “Waste Reclamation” puzzle.

What I had to modify to show this solution, is a couple of very far away debonders. Right before the solution outputs its final product (which is being very cleverly filtered from an array of no-matches by the output glyphs), it breaks a bond in the giant swinging waste chain. At its very end, the piece that broke off now doesn’t have to swing anymore, saving over a hundred area. After the final output, this piece causes a collision, but the puzzle is already solved.

Area tiebreaker turned out to be a bit of a headache due to incentivizing this, but the more important differences between solutions did still make the bigger difference. We will see PentaPig’s winning solution for this metric later.

SevenTStorm

One of the few newcomers to submit to every single week, SevenTStorm stuck it out. And it was definitely a challenge. After the cabinet puzzle in week 5, panic called upon a rare gimmick to make the next puzzles difficult. Triplex bonds on atoms that can never form triplex bonds naturally.

This is a good time to shout out the external puzzle editor, ompuzzle by kotritrona, which puzzle designers use to make all kinds of puzzles that the game doesn’t ordinarily support.

With triplex bonded metals, any triplex bond you need in the output, must be preserved from the input. This adds to the ordinary difficulty of projecting and purifying metals without being wasteful. SevenTStorm found a method for week 6’s Bicrsytal Transceiver that needed to make 2 outputs before it ended up clean again. That 59 area solution is shown below.

JonJon

JonJon also arrived during the 2022 weeklies, and immediately improved the cycles tiebreak on a long standing area record for Alcohol Separation. Clearly someone aiming high, they had several good finishes during the 2023 Opus Magnum tournament. By far their best performance was on Bicrystal Transceiver area. They were one of 8 competitors to get the minimum area of 23, and their cycles tiebreaker earned them 2nd place overall.

Unfortunately, this puzzle’s minimum area solutions are very, very slow. JonJon’s approach also needs to make 3 outputs before it ends up clean, so the gif is far too large to embed (72MB, this blog churns if I put anything on it larger than 25MB). Using F10 during the gif creation screen, I can select just a few key moments from the solution to make a gif, but it won’t loop in the nice way that the autogenerated gif will.

JonJon barely missed the overall top 10 in the tournament, finishing 11th with submissions to every week.

Transcendental Guy

The story behind Transcendental Guy’s name may be worth a blog post in itself, but I’ll let him continue his efforts to become Uncomputable Guy, or even “Uncomputable including if your computer has access to a halt oracle” Guy. Name pending. In short he built a machine with output rate equal to a transcendental number, one-upping the previous efforts to build an irrational rate machine.

For the actual tournament, he seemed to thrive in the latter half, when the puzzles were at their most difficult. After also achieving 23 area in Bicrystal Transceiver, he then went on to get 57 cycles in the week 7 cycles monster: Warp Fuel.

Warp Fuel was a truly brutal challenge, featuring the same triplex bonded metals from week 6, but now in a cycles context. To make things even hairier, the output had partial triplex bonds (yellow only) between fire and water. These triplex bonds can be made in game, and we had to do so by turning the fire into water after bonding. It all amounted to a horrifying 53 cycle theory min. Nobody got 53, and 57 was good enough for 9th.

Note in the above solution, that the lead which gets thrown away does a nice death-defying rotation through the input. This is possible because the new input doesn’t spawn in until after the movement phase ends, and the input that was previously there moved up and out of the way. Transcendental Guy chose to put this part of the solution on the (0, 0) “critelli” hex as a nice sort of emphasis.

Kazyan

I knew of Kazyan before he arrived in the 2023 tournament, due to sharing some history in the Conway’s Game of Life community. His submissions tended to have excellent notes accompanying them, written fully in character of “Alchemist Kazyan, /u/StillNotABrick”. One excellent and under-appreciated reference was on his period-optimized solution for Probe Module. Not quite as low as the winning period 4 solutions, Kazyan managed to make something at period 6. What struck me far too late to appreciate during the results stream, was the name. “Pipsquirter 1”.

This is in reference to an important pattern from Conway’s Game of Life, discovered in 1997 by Noam Elkies. The connection? They are both period 6!

Notice how in this solution, the difference between making the water output and the fire output, depends on the geometry of the connected pieces. Compare to wchpsh’s solution, where the difference was just that both tried to output over the water output glyph, and only the water one would succeed. Both of them take 6 full machine periods to complete one set of outputs.

Svenja

I never saw Svenja speak in discord or in the twitch stream, so only their solutions speak for them. They submitted to 5 weeks. Their most notable solution was a minimum cost solution for week 3. Unlike Daiya Diode’s solution shown earlier, this solution uses a wasteful algorithm. It is generally easier to solve this puzzle wastefully, because you do not need to place the single atom water input, leaving that space for handling instead. Neither option is particularly easy though, and it’s impressive to hit 40g in any way.

What’s particularly cool about Svenja’s solution, is that it has a very low instruction count. The waste doesn’t force there to be instructions for every cycle out to completion. It doesn’t even use instructions all the way to the end of a single product. It embraces symmetry. Each pass through the instructions handles one earth atom waste and one sixth of the product. A very clean way to achieve 40g.

RedstoneParadox

RedstoneParadox was around during the 2022 Opus Magnum tournament, but refrained from joining. This year though, they sent in solutions for 5 of the puzzles. Their best finish was in Bicrystal Transceiver area, with this 48 area solution:

Funny enough, this was one of the only submissions to use the disposal glyph, instead of trying to use purification to make the ratio come out cleanly. When not at the absolute limits of area, disposal is really very helpful. This approach makes the puzzle look a lot easier than the previous gifs.

Nova

Arguably one of the most impressive newcomers I have ever seen. On January 16th, Nova posted in discord “Hello cool people! I just want to say this tournament is really fun”

It came out that they got the game less than a month prior during the winter steam sale. This was their first programming game, but they looked at past tournament vods and this blog to understand what it was all about. And they had some general programming experience.

Now, this community has had years to get good. The level of competition was high, and newcomers were warned that they should keep their expectations low, learn by doing, practice and enjoy the experience.

Nova got 2nd place in the very first puzzle. And 2nd again, in the second puzzle. Honestly tragic that they missed out on getting a win, but they had the skill for it. Folks cracked quips like “Hey nova, what gaming chair do you use?” But, unfortunately, beyond the halfway point of the tournament, Nova was nowhere to be found.

Still, here is their 2nd place sum solution (280 sum) on Self-Pressurizing Gas:

And here is their 2nd place height solution (108 cycles in min height) on Waste Reclamation:

I hope to see Nova make a return someday!

SpiritualShampoo

SpiritualShampoo started playing during the weeklies in 2022, and managed to win one of them. He was using every available resource to get good as quickly as possible. His style can be best described as hypercompetitive. His self-standard was dangerously high for a newcomer, but he managed to continue to get top 10 placement after top 10 placement during the 2023 tournament. In week 7, he finally got a win. Here is his 54 cycle winning solution to Warp Fuel, using the technique known as “prebuilding”.

Rather than build on an 8 cycle loop like Transcendental Guy (or me, with my 56), this solution batches up 6 half-products using the first 24 cycles, and then finishes them off using the next 24 cycles. This allows a lot of extra latency for the first half, traded for a fair bit of cost and area, and a high throughput demand on the latter half. It worked here. This was the winning idea.

Other highlights of Spiritual Shampoo’s tournament debut

A horrifying Lexicographic Cycles solve for week 1, which managed to get an output on cycle 9, two outputs by cycle 12 (both of which matched my winning solution), but then was not able to loop. So instead it crammed out over a hundred additional hard coded outputs at maximum throughput and then finally sacrificed some cycles to clean up. This approach was titled “Tournament burnout speedrun world record” and can’t be reasonably converted to a gif. Some say the real self-pressurizing gas was the friends we made along the way.. Sadly, it had already secured 8th place just by having the 2nd output on cycle 12. PentaPig’s 7th place solution beat it outright to the 3rd output, so none of the extra hard coding made a difference!

One of the period 4 solutions to Probe Module, earning 2nd place via instructions tiebreak.

8th place or better on every single submission in weeks 1-5.

Overall 3rd place in the tournament proper! Which would be the highest placement ever achieved by someone in their first Opus Magnum tournament since 2020, if not for..

kaliuresis

In contrast to SpiritualShampoo’s unmistakable presence on the discord server, kaliuresis kept pretty quiet. They certainly had a lot else in common, though. Both arrived during the 2022 weeklies (the first I ever heard of kaliuresis was during the “biggie vs the world” challenge on Nightmare Fuel). Both held themselves to a very high standard, and used every available resource to meet it. Neither seemed to have any “weak” metric, finding a way to the top of the standings no matter the challenge.

However, while SpiritualShampoo ended up more or less locked into 3rd place, kaliuresis was doing that little bit better, and in an honest fight with PentaPig for the win. Going into the 6th week, kaliuresis was leading the entire tournament.

kaliuresis ended up with four 2nd place finishes, and one win. The win was in week 5 – their period 4 solution for Probe Module had the lowest instruction count. It’s a bit of a brain bender, even more so than wchpsh’s or Kazyan’s.

By delaying the single rotate instruction on the berlo wheel by a couple hundred cycles, kaliuresis was able to make the required 6 fire outputs before the solution settled into a steady state of making only water. This brings up the victory screen, so it is permitted as a solution approach.

It also takes 24 runs through the period 4 instruction tape, before it repeats the board state (whether making fire outputs or water outputs).

Other highlights of kaliuresis’ tournament debut

Along with zorflax and PentaPig, breaking the 10 instruction barrier on Waste Reclamation trackless instructions. This is their 9 instruction solution, modified to remove a far-off debonder that saved a couple dozen area:

kaliuresis had the only other 54 cycle solution to Warp Fuel cycles, and managed to get one of the only two minimum cost solutions to Warp Fuel as well. Min cost on this puzzle required overcoming so many constraints and challenges. It was as hard as puzzles that took the community years to tackle, and we had only a week. Warp Fuel 140g was a feat that PentaPig said he “truly didn’t think would happen”.

When kaliuresis put in the effort to take 2nd in both categories on the second to last week, it all came down to the final puzzle. Whether kaliuresis or PentaPig walked away with the tournament win, depended on Habitability Detector (the final computation puzzle which will be covered in an entirely separate blog post coming soon!). PentaPig held onto a slight advantage after dominating week 6, so for kaliuresis to win, PentaPig needed to get 5th or worse on the final puzzle.

So who won?

In the end, PentaPig pulled it off. 3rd place on the final puzzle was good enough.

For the 2nd year in a row, and 3rd time overall, PentaPig won the Opus Magnum tournament. The competition was fierce, and new names were in the running with SpiritualShampoo and kaliuresis, but the skill and innovation that PentaPig brings to every puzzle that the host puts in front of him, still was enough to come out with the victory.

So now let’s look at some winning solutions, and the people who made them.

Week 1

My solution for LexC was the winner – I was one of 5 people tied with the exact same output timing, but my area was lowest to win a tiebreak. In 2nd was fiesta0618, with the same LexC but 69 area, which honestly is a nicer result anyway. And speaking of fiesta..

fiesta0618’s solution for the sum metric. Compared to the one we saw earlier from Nova, this is a lot cheaper, while being slower and a tiny bit larger. When adding all the numbers up, this beat Nova by a single point, for the victory.

This also marks fiesta’s first win in a tournament! He may well be the most improved player from last year. He sat in first overall with one week of results.

Week 2

mr_puzzel dazzled us all with a unique approach for the height-3 challenge. Rather than build sticks, he built bricks. The title of this solution was 3 x 6 = 6 x 3. The extra mors atom that can be very annoying with this input, ends up in a stick of 3 that sits on top of the output after it is filled.

On the TI side, PentaPig had the winning 8 instruction submission. Also named with an equation, 2+2=3+1. It relies on the bonder in the middle to distinguish between two cases. Like in previous solutions for this metric, I am showing a version that doesn’t have a far-off debonder. It’s not like the saved area really mattered, as this design was the only one to solve the puzzle in 8 instructions at all.

Week 3

For the cost metric, my best description is that PentaPig did PentaPig things. When secondary optimizing for area at minimum cost, there isn’t anyone who does it better. He made a nice explainer here on what the thought process was to arrive at this machine. With 50 area, he beat rebix’s 52 area min cost solution, and zorflax’s 59. Nobody else was under 60.

The other metric for Hydroponic Solution was cycles. Grimmy, who I’ve mentioned in a few previous blog posts, joined in for the first time since the 2019 tournament. They had stopped participating for a few reasons – not really liking the structured timelines, specific puzzles, and hush-hush nature of tournament competition. But their cycles skill and prestige has remained through all these years, and they took an interest in week 3.

They were one of 19 people to hit minimum cycles, and they won on the cost tiebreaker using 370g of parts.

Tragically, the 2nd place solution by Bist (2022’s host), had 375g, but panic pointed out on stream a rather simple modification that would be able to make it 365g. Afterwards, the community together found further and further improvements on Bist’s solution bringing it all the way to 315g. The key idea, bonding all of the water on at the final step, turned out to be so powerful. Only Bist had found it before the deadline.

Week 4

On the sum4 metric, Goodbye Galaxy nailed his third ever tournament victory, and first since 2021. Already the designer of many of the existing sum4 records, he seems to vibe well with this metric. The margin of victory was incredible as well. With only 4 people under 500 he managed to get 469.

The other metric for this puzzle was area. And this sort of “sparse infinite” has a few shenanigans in store for area optimization. It was here that fiesta0618 pulled out a 2nd tournament win. While 14 people managed to spot the trick of loading the space with arms and connecting everything later, only fiesta had a layout that did it in 74.

This sort of situation where the winning solve bests the rest on primary alone, is always nice in Opus Magnum tournaments. When you can throw the most brilliant minds in the game at a task and get that result, you’ve made a good challenge for competition. For that winner here to be fiesta, is a testament to how good he has gotten at Opus Magnum. For reference, ShadowCluster, the notorious area main who typically playtests only the area puzzles, made a 75. Other 75s were hallojasper, zorflax, myself, kaliuresis, Noeuchar and rebix.

Week 5

We’ve already seen the winning period 4 solution by kaliuresis. The other period 4 solutions came from SpiritualShampoo, myself, PentaPig and wchpsh. The other metric for this puzzle was cycles. In a production chamber, cycles has a very different feel to it. You can’t sprawl out arbitrarily. But, I managed to pull off a win regardless. PentaPig and I were the only people to find 47 cycles, and my solution won the cost tiebreak.

Somewhat amusingly, this is a period 6 solution while trying to be low cycles. Having both period and cycles as metrics for this puzzle did mean that several people had the same solution score in both. The lowest periods had to find ways to take more tape loops and go slowly, but you could get as far as 6 just optimizing them both together.

Week 6

First, area. PentaPig’s winning solution has the same problems as JonJon’s in that no reasonable gif could embed in a blog post. His even takes 5 outputs to recover a clean board, not just 3. But as the winner, it was at least the fastest min area solution anybody made. So here’s a screen recording of the whole darn thing, at alt-click speed.

It’s worth noting that the bonder, debonder, and projector all can only be reached on one side by either of the arms (they are “half-access”). The other side necessarily has to be filled by a molecule, as no single atom can ever be placed there. Two of those three glyphs needed this property in order to get 23 area at all, but PentaPig found it fastest to do it for all three.

With diversity in how many inputs people use to cleanly make outputs, you may wonder what the most efficient way actually is. Well, that’s the purpose of week 6’s other metric: rate. Using the omsim library, panic’s website computed the rate of a submission by finding its steady state behavior and extrapolating all the way out to infinity.

With rate, you have to take the input as often as is possible, and use it with maximum efficiency. Some quick linear algebra says 43 inputs, taken over the course of 86 cycles, can perfectly make 7 outputs.

This was.. not the most enjoyable to program. But, 25 people did achieve it. Of them, the cheapest design was 550g, once again by PentaPig.

Don’t be fooled by the disposal glyph. Although there is an arm trying to throw things away, the quicksilver atoms end up projecting metals instead once the machine reaches steady state. The disposal attempts are only relevant while the machine is still getting going, before it settles into its loop.

Week 7

We’ve already seen SpiritualShampoo’s slick prebuilding solve. This won cycles, and was SpiritualShampoo’s first tournament win. But on the cost side, we haven’t seen the other 140g yet. The winner of week 7’s cost metric was rebix.

In previous tournaments, rebix submitted occasionally but only when there was a metric where they were particularly interested. This year, they changed their mindset:

Their actual finish placement varied pretty dramatically from metric to metric, as they put in different amounts of effort. They did end up getting 6th overall.

The highest effort, and corresponding highest placement, was in week 7 cost. Beating kaliuresis by a couple hundred cycles, rebix too built a 140g to win it. It took a very different (and debatably much easier) approach. Instead of kaliuresis’ method where each output needed slightly different and new waste handling, rebix built a “C” shape to deal with the single atom, and just stuck all excess waste onto it. With each output, it extended that shape in a wacky way (only needed to be wacky to avoid running into the berlo wheel). More waste, but less headache.

Week 8

Gets its own post!

Some remarks

The skill level was high, and the challenge level was high. But was the challenge level too high?

If you view Opus Magnum tournaments as a competition, the goal should be to make a challenge hard enough that the top players don’t all converge on one idea. So that means the puzzles might need to be pretty hard.

If you view Opus Magnum tournaments as a content farm, the goal should be to gather the top players and make them produce solutions that take the absolute limit of their patience, free time, and ability. In this light, harder is better. We wouldn’t get the same sort of stellar high effort solutions from a more casual setting.

But, when the game itself is not suited to create these solutions, and the results are harder and harder to view due to nonlooping, or gif size limits, has the challenge level missed the mark?

What do we do about it

There were some post-tournament surveys asking about how to handle this moving forward. On the one hand, there are community-made tools to help with the process of developing a monstrous solution (notgreat’s omclone, F43nd1r’s F43dit, any of the several mods by mr_puzzel available through Quintessential). But on the other, it shouldn’t require external tools to be competitive in an Opus Magnum tournament.

The creative metrics like TI, sum, period, height, all have done a reasonable job making the game hard without making it hard to play the game. The weeklies are planning to experiment with other, more restrictive ideas for difficulty. Last year had a puzzle which disabled all instructions except for grab, rotate and drop, which made the cycles and cost metrics far more challenging. Future tournaments may lean into this idea more.

Also discussed were shorter time limits, intentionally easier puzzles, only one metric per week instead of two. It all depends on what the goal of the tournament is. The tournaments serve as competition, content, building more interest in the community from outside, and fostering new connections within the community.

I know that I love the Opus Magnum tournaments as they are. If they need to change, I’ll do what I can to keep up. Already with the scoring changes this year, I’ve seen myself drop from the podium. If the metrics keep getting stranger, and brilliant new players keep showing up, I might be relegated to commentary and blogging. But I’ll keep trying to win it as long as I can!

Final Standings

You can see the full detail at the tournament spreadsheet here.

10th place went to Bist, whose previous best overall finish was 13th in 2021.

9th went to Bambi, whose previous best was 15th in 2022.

8th went to mr_puzzel, who won height in week 3, and has taken the role of mod-maker extraordinaire.

7th went to Goodbye Galaxy, up from 10th last year and with his first win in the sum4 metric.

6th went to rebix, who next year will go back to submitting intermittently.

5th was me. Wins helped, but did not make up for frequent more-average performances in off metrics.

4th was fiesta0618, up from 16th in 2022. Tremendous improvement!

3rd was SpiritualShampoo

2nd was kaliuresis

and 1st, once again, was PentaPig.

Thanks for reading!