First Waves

Now I’m rather pleased that I can get myself around Wave, post links to my pho­tos and gen­er­ally do all the good stuff.

There are how­ever, peo­ple of my acquain­tance who are a lot more tech­no­log­i­cally ‘ept’ (it should be a word, you know —  the oppo­site of inept) and have started muck­ing about under the bon­net of Wave.

One of these is Dave, and the other day he intro­duced me to a lit­tle gad­get he calls 5×5.  The object of the game is to totally fill the grid with black squares. Click­ing on a square results in that square (and those around it as seen in the ini­tial pat­tern below) tog­gling its colour. There is a solu­tion in 14 moves.

DaveP’s 5×5

I’ll hand over to Dave to explain what it is, how it came about,  and how it works.

5×5 is a puz­zle I first saw as a DOS PC thing back in the late 1980s. I wrote my own ver­sion of it back then (just for fun) and, ever since, it’s sort of been my “try a new envi­ron­ment” project. I’ve writ­ten ver­sions for DOS, Win­dows, OS/2, the old Palm Pilot and even for GNU emacs.

Some time back I quickly wrote a HTML/Javascript ver­sion so, given that that’s pretty much all a Wave gad­get is, I reworked it as a gad­get. The main dif­fer­ence with this ver­sion is that it’s coded with the state of the game held in the Wave. This means that a) you can always come back to it and it’ll be how you left it and b) every­one who is part of the Wave can see what’s hap­pen­ing and can also make moves.

All you have to do is use the “add a gad­get” tool­bar but­ton (the one that looks like a green jig­saw) and just input this URL in the dia­log that you get: http://serenity.davep.org/5x5/5x5.xml

Hmm — the fun stuff begins!

Oh, and PS … I couldn’t do the puz­zle (/grin) not even using Wave’s fab­u­lous “play­back” feature!