Lately I’ve been entertaining myself with a silly little mobile app called Little Alchemy 2, a simple revamp of an earlier concept game. It distracted me enough this week that I didn’t prepare a respectable blog post. While questioning my life choices, I started to convince myself that maybe I had been playing at testing this whole time. Testers, myself included, love to make analogies to science, and this is a game that simulates the precursor to modern chemistry. Of course it can be used as a tortured metaphor for software testing! Follow me on my journey…
Exploration
The main concept of the game is to drag icons of real life objects on top of each other, combining them to make new items.
At first there are only a few options: Water, Earth, Fire, Air. The classics. Not hard to just play around with different combinations and see how this game works.
Fire + Water = Steam. Makes sense.
Water + Earth = Mud. Great.
Now I wonder what happens if I combine steam and mud….
After a while you start to get a sense for how this universe works.
Developing heuristics
After a while I start to see patterns. If I combine the same thing with itself I get a bigger version of that thing; can I do that with everything? Fire seems transform most items. When I find out how to make paper or wood, I’m probably going to try to throw those on the fire too.
Combinations quickly multiply.
Before long I have hundreds of items of all sorts. Too many to keep in my head. I start to think I’m probably missing combinations, or I’ve forgotten what combinations I’ve already tried. I know I tried putting wood into fire but I did I put wood into the campfire? Am I missing some obvious combination that’s right in front of me?
Using an Oracle
That’s when I start googling around for hints and suggestions. This part gets a bit cheaty, but at the time it was what I needed to do to get a handle on the problem and keep making progress. I found a site that would randomly show me an item, and I could use that to see if I had the pieces I needed to make it. No more guessing, I was given the right answer.
I suppose this is where I could veer off into automation, but where’s the fun in that? After a while, I started to exhaust the hint system anyway; with only random items the ratio of new to known items started to decline. ROI went down. My oracle was getting less useful, not telling me anything new.
Brute force
There were still an intractable number of items and I had seen enough unexpected combinations that I didn’t trust myself to reason them all out myself. So instead, I turned to brute force.
First item on the list. Try to combine with every item below it. Repeat.
Now I should really think about automation if my goal was to just find all combinations. This is a pure algorithm with finite steps since the game promises a finite number of items. But things start to change after using this for a few iterations manually. Happily the game removes items that have no undiscovered combinations, so in theory the complexity will peak and game will start get simpler again. (Wouldn’t it be nice if software always got simpler with time?) Moreover, a little bit of brute force starts to show patterns that I hadn’t been aware of before. I start to skip ahead: “aha! if that combination works, then I bet this other one will too…” One new strategy begets another!
Inference and deduction
I reach a breaking point where items are being removed from play more and more often. This feels like the home stretch but brute forcing it will still take ages. Often, though, an item only has one or two combinations left to discover before it’s exhausted. I use this to my advantage.
Enter another oracle of sorts; this time, it’s the documentation of everything I’ve done so far. For any item still on the board, the game tells me how many undiscovered combinations an item has, items that have been used to make it, and all the other items it has been used to make so far. This is all data I can analyse to look for yet more patterns, and spot gaps in patterns that have been missed so far. The rate at which I clear items off the board goes way up, and I’m still using the same manual interactions I’ve used all along.
End game
I’m not there yet. Do I still have more to learn? Is another strategy going to make itself obvious before I finish the game, or an old one resurface as the dynamics change?
And what am I going to explore next?
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