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Logic Puzzle Sampler
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About the game
Through the door to the north is a bare playroom: a white table, a few spheres, cubes and pyramids in different colours, and a large blue genie asleep underneath it all. Wake him and he will write, in his own careful hand, any simple sentence you like about the room on a piece of paper: that the blue sphere is on the table, that the door is open, that the red pyramid is touching the green cube.
The paper then changes colour to show whether the sentence is true. Green means true and red means false, and the colour keeps itself up to date: move the sphere off the table and the paper turns at once. The fun starts when the sentences begin to talk about the papers themselves. Write that a paper is red, on that very paper, and you have built the old liar paradox out of stationery; the game has its own colour for that, too.
Andrew Plotkin made Logic Puzzle Sampler in 2003 as the sample for his IF Logic Puzzle Mini-Competition, and he is the first to say it is a toy rather than a game: there is no goal and no score to chase, only a small world to experiment with. It suits anyone who enjoys logic puzzles, paradoxes or seeing how a text adventure keeps track of its world.
Playing it here
Click Play now and the story starts in the player. Type a command after the >
prompt and press Enter. The game is in English. Start with about, then go
north into the playroom.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
north (n) / south (s) |
go into the playroom and back out |
wake genie |
get his attention |
write "the blue sphere is on the table" |
the genie writes the sentence on a fresh piece of paper |
erase paper |
wipe a piece of paper so it can be used again |
take, put something on something, drop |
move the blocks around |
examine (x) something |
look closer, including at the colour of each paper |
about / more about |
the short and the long explanation |
A few things worth knowing
Sentences have three shapes. "The thing is on the thing", "the
thing is touching the thing" and "the thing is colour or state"
(for example the door is open or the table is white).
Papers can talk about papers. A sentence can name another piece of paper, or the paper it is written on. That is where the paradoxes live.
Four colours, four answers. Green is true, red is false, grey is a paradox, and brown means the sentence could go either way.
Debug mode is on. This was published as sample code, so a few developer commands are left in. They do no harm.
Credits and licence
Logic Puzzle Sampler was written by Andrew Plotkin. The version served here is Release 2 (serial 030211), from the package he sent to the IF Archive, which also holds the Inform source code; the package is linked from this page, without the accompanying essay, which is not covered by the dedication. Andrew Plotkin placed the game and its source code in the public domain.