Ubuntu Manpage: sgt-guess - Combination-guessing puzzle

Provided by: sgt-puzzles_20230410.71cf891-2build2_amd64

NAME

       sgt-guess - Combination-guessing puzzle

SYNOPSIS

       sgt-guess  [--generate  n]  [--print wxh [--with-solutions] [--scale n] [--colour]] [game-
       parameters|game-ID|random-seed]

       sgt-guess --version

DESCRIPTION

       You have a set of coloured pegs, and have to reproduce a predetermined  sequence  of  them
       (chosen by the computer) within a certain number of guesses.

       Each  guess  gets  marked with the number of correctly-coloured pegs in the correct places
       (in black), and also the number of correctly-coloured pegs in the wrong places (in white).

       This game is also known (and marketed, by Hasbro, mainly) as a  board  game  ‘Mastermind’,
       with  6  colours,  4  pegs  per  row,  and 10 guesses. However, this version allows custom
       settings of number of colours (up to 10), number of pegs per row, and number of guesses.

       Guess was contributed to this collection by James Harvey.

Guess controls

This game can be played with either the keyboard or the mouse.

With the mouse, drag a coloured peg from the tray on the left-hand side to its required
position in the current guess; pegs may also be dragged from current and past guesses to
copy them elsewhere. To remove a peg, drag it off its current position to somewhere
invalid.

Right-clicking in the current guess adds a ‘hold’ marker; pegs that have hold markers will
be automatically added to the next guess after marking.

Alternatively, with the keyboard, the up and down cursor keys can be used to select a peg
colour, the left and right keys to select a peg position, and the Enter key to place a peg
of the selected colour in the chosen position. ‘D’ or Backspace removes a peg, and Space
adds a hold marker.

The number keys can also be used to insert pegs: ‘1’ inserts the top-most colour, ‘2’ the
second one, and so forth. These also move the peg cursor to the right. Pressing ‘L’ will
label the pegs with their numbers.

Pressing ‘h’ or ‘?’ will fill the current guess with a suggested guess. Using this is not
recommended for 10 or more pegs as it is slow.

When the guess is complete, the smaller feedback pegs will be highlighted; clicking on
these (or moving the peg cursor to them with the arrow keys and pressing the space bar or
Enter key) will mark the current guess, copy any held pegs to the next guess, and move the
‘current guess’ marker.

If you correctly position all the pegs the solution will be displayed below; if you run
out of guesses (or select ‘Solve...’) the solution will also be revealed.

(All the actions described below are also available.)

Guess parameters

       These parameters are available from the ‘Custom...’ option on the ‘Type’ menu. The default
       game matches the parameters for the board game ‘Mastermind’.

       Colours
              Number of colours the solution is chosen from; from 2 to 10 (more is harder).

       Pegs per guess
              Number of pegs per guess (more is harder).

       Guesses
              Number of guesses you have to find the solution in (fewer is harder).

       Allow blanks
              Allows blank pegs to be given as part of a guess (makes it easier, because you know
              that those will never be counted as part of the solution). This is  turned  off  by
              default.

              Note that this doesn't allow blank pegs in the solution; if you really wanted that,
              use one extra colour.

       Allow duplicates
              Allows the solution (and the guesses) to  contain  colours  more  than  once;  this
              increases the search space (making things harder), and is turned on by default.

Common actions

These actions are all available from the ‘Game’ menu and via keyboard shortcuts, in
addition to any game-specific actions.

(On Mac OS X, to conform with local user interface standards, these actions are situated
on the ‘File’ and ‘Edit’ menus instead.)

New game (‘N’, Ctrl+‘N’)
Starts a new game, with a random initial state.

Restart game
Resets the current game to its initial state. (This can be undone.)

Load Loads a saved game from a file on disk.

Save Saves the current state of your game to a file on disk.

The Load and Save operations preserve your entire game history (so you can save,
reload, and still Undo and Redo things you had done before saving).

Print Where supported (currently only on Windows), brings up a dialog allowing you to
print an arbitrary number of puzzles randomly generated from the current
parameters, optionally including the current puzzle. (Only for puzzles which make
sense to print, of course – it's hard to think of a sensible printable
representation of Fifteen!)

Undo (‘U’, Ctrl+‘Z’, Ctrl+‘_’, ‘*’)
Undoes a single move. (You can undo moves back to the start of the session.)

Redo (‘R’, Ctrl+‘R’, ‘#’)
Redoes a previously undone move.

Copy Copies the current state of your game to the clipboard in text format, so that you
can paste it into (say) an e-mail client or a web message board if you're
discussing the game with someone else. (Not all games support this feature.)

Solve Transforms the puzzle instantly into its solved state. For some games (Cube) this
feature is not supported at all because it is of no particular use. For other games
(such as Pattern), the solved state can be used to give you information, if you
can't see how a solution can exist at all or you want to know where you made a
mistake. For still other games (such as Sixteen), automatic solution tells you
nothing about how to get to the solution, but it does provide a useful way to get
there quickly so that you can experiment with set-piece moves and transformations.

Some games (such as Solo) are capable of solving a game ID you have typed in from
elsewhere. Other games (such as Rectangles) cannot solve a game ID they didn't
invent themself, but when they did invent the game ID they know what the solution
is already. Still other games (Pattern) can solve some external game IDs, but only
if they aren't too difficult.

The ‘Solve’ command adds the solved state to the end of the undo chain for the
puzzle. In other words, if you want to go back to solving it yourself after seeing
the answer, you can just press Undo.

Quit (‘Q’, Ctrl+‘Q’)
Closes the application entirely.

Specifying games with the game ID

There are two ways to save a game specification out of a puzzle and recreate it later, or
recreate it in somebody else's copy of the same puzzle.

The ‘Specific’ and ‘Random Seed’ options from the ‘Game’ menu (or the ‘File’ menu, on Mac
OS X) each show a piece of text (a ‘game ID’) which is sufficient to reconstruct precisely
the same game at a later date.

You can enter either of these pieces of text back into the program (via the same
‘Specific’ or ‘Random Seed’ menu options) at a later point, and it will recreate the same
game. You can also use either one as a command line argument (on Windows or Unix); see
below for more detail.

The difference between the two forms is that a descriptive game ID is a literal
description of the initial state of the game, whereas a random seed is just a piece of
arbitrary text which was provided as input to the random number generator used to create
the puzzle. This means that:

• Descriptive game IDs tend to be longer in many puzzles (although some, such as Cube
(sgt-cube(6)), only need very short descriptions). So a random seed is often a
quicker way to note down the puzzle you're currently playing, or to tell it to
somebody else so they can play the same one as you.

• Any text at all is a valid random seed. The automatically generated ones are
fifteen-digit numbers, but anything will do; you can type in your full name, or a
word you just made up, and a valid puzzle will be generated from it. This provides
a way for two or more people to race to complete the same puzzle: you think of a
random seed, then everybody types it in at the same time, and nobody has an
advantage due to having seen the generated puzzle before anybody else.

• It is often possible to convert puzzles from other sources (such as ‘nonograms’ or
‘sudoku’ from newspapers) into descriptive game IDs suitable for use with these
programs.

• Random seeds are not guaranteed to produce the same result if you use them with a
different version of the puzzle program. This is because the generation algorithm
might have been improved or modified in later versions of the code, and will
therefore produce a different result when given the same sequence of random
numbers. Use a descriptive game ID if you aren't sure that it will be used on the
same version of the program as yours.

(Use the ‘About’ menu option to find out the version number of the program.
Programs with the same version number running on different platforms should still
be random-seed compatible.)

A descriptive game ID starts with a piece of text which encodes the parameters of the
current game (such as grid size). Then there is a colon, and after that is the description
of the game's initial state. A random seed starts with a similar string of parameters, but
then it contains a hash sign followed by arbitrary data.

If you enter a descriptive game ID, the program will not be able to show you the random
seed which generated it, since it wasn't generated from a random seed. If you enter a
random seed, however, the program will be able to show you the descriptive game ID derived
from that random seed.

Note that the game parameter strings are not always identical between the two forms. For
some games, there will be parameter data provided with the random seed which is not
included in the descriptive game ID. This is because that parameter information is only
relevant when generating puzzle grids, and is not important when playing them. Thus, for
example, the difficulty level in Solo (sgt-solo(6)) is not mentioned in the descriptive
game ID.

These additional parameters are also not set permanently if you type in a game ID. For
example, suppose you have Solo set to ‘Advanced’ difficulty level, and then a friend wants
your help with a ‘Trivial’ puzzle; so the friend reads out a random seed specifying
‘Trivial’ difficulty, and you type it in. The program will generate you the same ‘Trivial’
grid which your friend was having trouble with, but once you have finished playing it,
when you ask for a new game it will automatically go back to the ‘Advanced’ difficulty
which it was previously set on.

The ‘Type’ menu

       The  ‘Type’ menu, if present, may contain a list of preset game settings. Selecting one of
       these will start a new random game with the parameters specified.

       The ‘Type’ menu may also contain a ‘Custom’ option which  allows  you  to  fine-tune  game
       parameters.  The  parameters  available are specific to each game and are described in the
       following sections.

Specifying game parameters on the command line

(This section does not apply to the Mac OS X version.)

The games in this collection deliberately do not ever save information on to the computer
they run on: they have no high score tables and no saved preferences. (This is because I
expect at least some people to play them at work, and those people will probably
appreciate leaving as little evidence as possible!)

However, if you do want to arrange for one of these games to default to a particular set
of parameters, you can specify them on the command line.

The easiest way to do this is to set up the parameters you want using the ‘Type’ menu (see
above), and then to select ‘Random Seed’ from the ‘Game’ or ‘File’ menu (see above). The
text in the ‘Game ID’ box will be composed of two parts, separated by a hash. The first of
these parts represents the game parameters (the size of the playing area, for example, and
anything else you set using the ‘Type’ menu).

If you run the game with just that parameter text on the command line, it will start up
with the settings you specified.

For example: if you run Cube (see sgt-cube(6)), select ‘Octahedron’ from the ‘Type’ menu,
and then go to the game ID selection, you will see a string of the form
‘o2x2#338686542711620’. Take only the part before the hash (‘o2x2’), and start Cube with
that text on the command line: ‘sgt-cube o2x2’.

If you copy the entire game ID on to the command line, the game will start up in the
specific game that was described. This is occasionally a more convenient way to start a
particular game ID than by pasting it into the game ID selection box.

(You could also retrieve the encoded game parameters using the ‘Specific’ menu option
instead of ‘Random Seed’, but if you do then some options, such as the difficulty level in
Solo, will be missing. See above for more details on this.)

Unix command-line options

(This section only applies to the Unix port.)

In addition to being able to specify game parameters on the command line (see above),
there are various other options:

--game

--load These options respectively determine whether the command-line argument is treated
as specifying game parameters or a save file to load. Only one should be specified.
If neither of these options is specified, a guess is made based on the format of
the argument.

--generate n
If this option is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a number of
descriptive game IDs will be invented and printed on standard output. This is
useful for gaining access to the game generation algorithms without necessarily
using the frontend.

If game parameters are specified on the command-line, they will be used to generate
the game IDs; otherwise a default set of parameters will be used.

The most common use of this option is in conjunction with --print, in which case
its behaviour is slightly different; see below.

--print wxh
If this option is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a printed
representation of one or more unsolved puzzles is sent to standard output, in
PostScript format.

On each page of puzzles, there will be w across and h down. If there are more
puzzles than w×h, more than one page will be printed.

If --generate has also been specified, the invented game IDs will be used to
generate the printed output. Otherwise, a list of game IDs is expected on standard
input (which can be descriptive or random seeds; see above), in the same format
produced by --generate.

For example:

sgt-net --generate 12 --print 2x3 7x7w | lpr

will generate two pages of printed Net puzzles (each of which will have a 7×7
wrapping grid), and pipe the output to the lpr command, which on many systems will
send them to an actual printer.

There are various other options which affect printing; see below.

--save file-prefix [ --save-suffix file-suffix ]
If this option is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, saved-game files
for one or more unsolved puzzles are written to files constructed from the supplied
prefix and/or suffix.

For example:

sgt-net --generate 12 --save game --save-suffix .sav

will generate twelve Net saved-game files with the names game0.sav to game11.sav.

--version
Prints version information about the game, and then quits.

The following options are only meaningful if --print is also specified:

--with-solutions
The set of pages filled with unsolved puzzles will be followed by the solutions to
those puzzles.

--scale n
Adjusts how big each puzzle is when printed. Larger numbers make puzzles bigger;
the default is 1.0.

--colour
Puzzles will be printed in colour, rather than in black and white (if supported by
the puzzle).