Some of you might remember a little bit of Neopets mania last summer. There was this one puzzle that just seemed so hard, that I had to write a program to solve it. It took over my life for months. I finally gave up trying to solve it entirely. In February, I took it up again, and given some algorithmic help by a past champion, finally beat Shapeshifter.

It’s all very Karate-kid-ish.

I only played Neopets to solve this one puzzle, and now that it’s done, I won’t ever play again. I’ll put my Neopets up for adoption. But for the entire month of April, my name will live at the top of the high scores, and if I die tonight, I’ll die knowing that I died a bona fide champion.

This wasn’t the final puzzle, but it was close. Surprisingly, this is one of the easier puzzles.

Yeah, I’m back on Shapeshifter again, that amazingly difficult puzzle game on Neopets.

I’ve been thinking about getting back in that race again. I burned out on the puzzle back in September, but I have been getting encouraging notes from people urging me not to give up. There’s a strange community of solvers out there. People get up to about 25 on their own, then get stumped and either give up or try to write a solver.

Anyway, I somehow acquired a mentor who is going to give me encouragement and algorithmic help on my road to level 100. I’ve just done levels 80 and 81 without any significant code changes, though I did download the Python-C compiler onto my dual core machine so I could pump up the performance of my current, Python-based solver.

Now I want to translate it all into Java and multithread it, see what happens there…

It’s still a long distance to 100.

Thanks to Emily from Neopets who kept working with me until I remembered enough details of what I had in Neopets so that she could send me the info I needed to log in again.

Spitefur is staying in a luxury hotel the next five days until she gets back to good health.

Now to take a look at Shapeshifter again…