Tick tock, fellow alchemists. As the reagent's metals soak quicksilver, the leaden clock hand pivots. Soon, the reagent becomes gold, and quicksilver passes through to pick up a second clock hand, to be swept towards its partner. The two clocks tick in unison, their phase differences telling the tale of which metal they were wound from; they are marked with Glyphs of Equilibrium near Critelli's logo. If they have the same birth sign, their hands meet across the bonder, and the new hand is moved to storage, continuing to tick there. If they differ, their hands miss one another, and the new is never stored. In this difference, the rest of the machine identifies its task, with bonding and debonding that is not interesting to recount--and in either case, out with the old clock hand and in with the new, the old being elegantly recycled for available lead.

This is the most difficult transmutation I have performed in recent memory, by a wide margin, and stretched my cognitive maxima. To find an efficient method and to do it parsimoniously...I believe I have succeeded, but only partially. 7th place, perhaps? I take this experience as my punishment for publicizing the Pitch Drop Experiment. To those who experienced it the same way that I experienced this one, I can only beg forgiveness. 

It was publicly postulated that since cycles were cheap and abundant for this task, more algorithms were viable for high performance than if they weren't. I don't claim my machine to be among the best (feel free to heckle me if it is), but these clock hands were sharply better than my other algorithms to the point where the exact weighting of sum was not on my mind. Measuring metals with the length of quicksilver rods was slow, area-intensive, and required reconstituting metals after measuring the rods. The Glyph of Purification was fast at equality testing, but required much extra machinery and complexity to account for gold and further complexity in disposing of partial Ravari's Wheels--to the point that I could not complete it. Clock hands were nearly as fast as purification, with much less complexity, easier waste handling, and lead was readily available for conditional logic by taking apart yesterday's clock hand. By integrating unusable gold into the clock hands, all waste even makes it to the Glyph of Disposal. But I don't claim that this hunger for area and overspending is the best algorithm in information alchemy for this task--wait for better scores to learn the truth.

- Alchemist Kazyan