Welcome to the monthly TIS-100 puzzle!
This is a friendly competition starting at the first Friday of each month. Players will be given a custom specification to work on for 11 days, and then on that Tuesday all submissions will be released for community optimization.
There won't be any hard rules on how to solve the puzzle, but in a competitive spirit, badges will be awarded based on your performance! If you have the lowest cycles/nodes/instructions, you'll get a badge at the end of the competitive period. Ideally, additional badges will be given for rather good solutions that don't reach peak performance, but the mechanism for determining this remains to be seen. These badges will be the only continuity between months, so if you're just interested in the rankings per-month, a spreadsheet will be made available showing all the results.
Solutions don't have to follow the specification perfectly, but cheaty solutions will be flagged! The TIS-100 simulator created by killerbee13 and 12345ieee will simulate your solution under thousands of seeds and if it fails any of them, it'll be marked as /c. Particularly hard-coded solutions get the honor of /h when the pass rate is less than 5% of the time. Cheaty solutions are still eligible for badges, just not the same badges as "normal" play.
Submissions began: Friday 2:00pm UTC, February 2nd, 2025
Submissions end: Tuesday 2:00pm UTC, February 18th, 2025
Our inaugural puzzle was designed by Hersmunch!
Please direct any questions about the specification to him (discord: hersmunch), or other questions to me (discord: arpy0). We're both around in the #tis-100 channel of the
unofficial Zachtronics discord.
These monthly puzzles can only continue with the efforts of the community. Currently, there are three puzzles in the backlog for future months. If you're interested in sustaining these competitive events, please help increase that number by sending me your own custom specifications!
IMPORTANT: Specifications in TIS-100 are seeded by their filename and that seed determines the three "fixed" tests you'll see in the spec. This means that if you use the clipboard import, you must rename the file to have an alphabetical character at the start, which defaults the seed to 0, ensuring same experience as other players.
You can also include a .zip file. Submit as many times as you want.
Solution files are found in `Documents/My Games/TIS-100/[steam id]/save`