"It's only gold/cost", they said. "It will be quick and easy...", they said...

NOT!

I came up with this layout... this part took 1 minute... the rest... well...

First I tried doing a 16 stick plucking off the mercuries(quicksilvers) to make the 6 'higher' metal-mercury pairs and add these 6 onto the end of the tin stick after the remaining mercuries. This was fine, though required a bit of stick walking but ultimately it didn't work out because I'd effectively 'used' both ends of the stick in a way that meant I would not be able to repeat 5 more times. One end of the stick is rotated against the arm in a complete flip meaning anything attached there for future repetitions would collide with the arm base, and the other end has the extra metal mercuries attached which also lead to collisions...

So I thought fuck it - why not make one big long stick? One long stick of 16x6 atom pairs... 96 atoms long... so I did... though in omclone and it took an age just to program the production of the higher metal atoms required for just the first 2 products (1/3rd of that part of the process - never mind the building and outputting of the products!) due to all the arm walking between each upgrading of the metal atoms and attaching to the end of the stick (which to start with is 96 atoms long... slowly reduces over time, but still...). I could only seem to cut 'n' paste a certain amount of letter instructions at a time in omclone and it was chaos - so I abandoned that attempt - even though it would almost certainly have been min gold and work for 6 products... however - omclone started to lag (with collision detection on) and it would prolly destroy the host's computer... Just the 1/3rd that I'd done was over 30,000 instructions/cycles... so if finished it would have been over 90,000 - prolly closer to 100,000 with the build process still to do! So I abandoned that...

Then I thought so long as I can keep one end of the stick clear I can do this with much smaller length stick parts which is what I ultimately came up with. Took 10 hours to program... 8pm 'til 6am next day (and I had to be at work for 9am, get up about 8am...! And I didn't use omclone for this version - programmed from scratch!

So I think (HOPE!) I have min gold at 60, but I imagine instructions and definitely area (though that is tertiary) will let me down a bit! Guess I'll see how the pros like rebix & kali do this wasteless - if they try - and if wasteless is possible, at least in fewer cycles/instructions!

Also, I particularly like cycle 658 where there is a bond and de-bond at the same time - it wasn't totally planned but hey it happened and worked! Also, the tin 'stick' represents a rifle at some points due to the 'handle' added, required to still be able to grab the stick after the last gold-silver pair has been removed from it to be able to manouever the stick ready for the next tape loop (thankfully it is 1T...)! At cycle 743 there is a not-required bond made but it is as if the rifle is being reloaded... so a nice (again not really planned!) touch!

No time to do 'cycles' this week for me, although that would probably be much faster to program - but I think I'm 'better' at gold primaries!

Solo this week - Jammuu already declared they had made their own solves before I started which is cool - we may pair up for later puzzles but we'll see - depends on the metrics and time! I spent way too long on this one just for Gold!

42Genius42