as a programmer, i’ve been looking forward to this! solving this puzzle genuinely made me the happiest i have ever been while playing this game. huge thanks to biggie; i couldn’t have done it without her blog posts. thanks also to the tourney organizers. the puzzles so far have been a lot of fun, and i’m looking forward to seeing what else this tourney has in store!

also, i wrote a description of how the machine works below, but it’s kinda long, so you don’t have to read it. anyway, here we go.

in the bottom left is the cardinal checker. if the template atom is a cardinal, we duplicate it onto a salt before we convert it into a fire, triplex it to another fire, and bond it to the aforementioned salt. we then move this 3 atom molecule to a section where we use it repeatedly to duplicate the template element onto another salt and swing it into a position to be output. (fun fact, this means that the machine also works if salt is the template! no bonus points though.)

if the template atom is instead a metal, it passes through the cardinal checker unharmed and moves to the metal detector at the top. in setup, we create a stick of 5 quicksilver. we then use this stick to project the template into gold, and form the remaining quicksilver back into a stick. because 5-(5-x)=x, the resulting stick has exactly enough quicksilver to project lead into the template metal. we put 5 more quicksilver on the 5 top right bonders, and use the stick to pull the right amount of quicksilver from them, throwing the rest into disposal. then we debond the pulled quicksilver one at a time to project a lead into the template metal and output it, putting the stick back so it can be reused.

however, if the template is a cardinal, the metal detector will still output gold. so before we output a metal, we leave it on a bonder for one cycle. if a cardinal is to be output, we first bond it to the gold and swing it over to a debonder where we then send the gold to disposal. on the other hand, if the template is a metal, the triplex will fail and we will not build the 3 atom molecule, meaning the salt will not be swung to the output arm and we can send it to disposal instead. this way, we ensure only one side of the machine will output, and the correct atom will be output every time.