<![CDATA[Special Puzzle 11: Canon and Gigue in D]]>Musical Marathon This is an optimization puzzle. Lay groups of notes on the grid and program a robot to move along a path. When the robot moves on top of a group of notes, the exact group of notes is played. When the robot moves on top of a cell without any group, the previous note is simply held. A group of notes is played for a quaver (half of a quarter, eighth of a measure), so the robot moves at the speed of two units per beat. The given score must be played precisely. The robot may not stop; they must move to an orthogonally adjacent square every quaver. Optimize by using the least number of notes.

Here is the puzzle (Canon and Gigue in D by Johann Pachelbel), and an example solution by me that is fairly optimized (31 notes):

Special Puzzle 11: Musical Marathon

Special Puzzle 11: Canon and Gigue in D
Musical Marathon
(MIDI if you want to listen instead of read)

The path is the following, starting from the black-bordered square (B indicates introducing the robot):
B↓←↑→↓←↑ / →↑↑←↑↑→→ / ←↓←↑→↓→→ / ↓→←↑↓↓←← / →↑←↓→↓↓→ / ←→→←←↓→→ / →↓↓→←←↑← / ↑→↓←←←←↓

(You can imagine it. Sadly I don’t have an applet to play it or something. I need to make some applets heh 😛 )

Yes, as you can see, I’m into optimization puzzles too. Also, I listen to too many songs and I recently (re)played SpaceChem, so…yeah.

I also have a 33-measure (264-quaver) song soon. I only need to create the score 😛

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