Wonderful! this chamber is hard! this chamber makes you think! and at the end, you have this wonderful feeling of "Ahhhhh, I finally beat it!" and that feeling feels so good! 10/10 would recommend to others!

a lot of put that cube into the blue portal room for storage move on to next room take out cube
a lot of put cube into blue portal room, go into next room then get the cube from blue portal room, come back for other cube rinse and repeat, also don't forget which cube came from what respawn, btw thank you for using both the companion cube and the regular cube for different cubes, a lot of map makers don't do that, and I just hate using the wrong cube for an respawn.

Okay the last one still took me good 45 mins! I didn't read even the intro part of the map description and went in with the expectation that this has some nice very general induction type structure and got quiet frustrated when in reality the solutions were far more specific and simple. Especially in the third one when the solutions were simply cube respawns! . It seems like the intended solution as well but do correct me if I got it wrong.

Highly recommend going through the description and the exercise after the puzzle.

Clever.... verrrry clever... AND FOOLISH!

Very nice idea. I am usually not so good at logic puzzles when there are a lot of different elements involved but I think having just buttons, cubes and fizzlers made it a lot easier to comprehend. It practically solved itself for me since there are only a very limited amount of moves you can make (as you stated yourself). Of course that didn't prevent me from swapping the cubes and having to go back. Also I think the 2nd chamber conditioned me into thinking I had to use buttons and portals so when I was making my way through the 3rd chamber, before I had collected any cubes, I completely forgot I could just walk through the fizzlers.

Loved this chamber! Took me a long time to solve, but I think I learned pretty interesting mechanics in it.

Found a playthrough online and completed it. Can't believe I missed the solution

cant figure out how to get back to the cube respawn room without going through a fizzler in the third room. Been stuck for a while and can't find any solution online. If someone can help me that would be helpful. It feels like its impossible by one room lol

@inifroyo @reubos Thanks a lot for playing :D Glad you liked it!

Very interesting and elegant puzzle.

(My original comment was too long, here is the rest of it)

I think my favorite part of the puzzle was figuring out the cube swap, I have no idea why, but I audibly gasped in delight. Uhhh anyways I really enjoyed this map, I've never been to good at them, and I know that this puzzle isn't actually that complex, but I think its really fascinating how you can make something that looks so simple, yet plays so complex, it was a great map.

Apparently most other people did not find this map too hard, holy fuck this shit busted my brain, I completed the first puzzle in 5 minutes, the second one in 20, and the last in an hour and a half, I must have done the same action 20 different times before I took a slight deviation, and completed the puzzle. (If you are wondering, I got stuck on the part where you are supposed to have the blue portal near the entrance pointing towards the laser receiver, and figuring out how to make it all the way to the blue cube's button without touching the laser gates (also yeah I'm not too knowledgeable on the portal lingo, all I know is the companion cube, we all do are parts))

Haha, perhaps I got a little overexcited, but I think you're right that this setup is clean enough to work. Certainly in a countable case, the player would become completely abstract as an act of both necessity and human kindness.

@Aneonen Thanks a lot for your comments! Quite an interesting chain of thought. I've thought about representing Portal puzzles with graph theory before, but I've never succeeded in a satisfactory way. Perhaps this particular instance is so ''elementary'' that it could work... and lol a countably infinite set of rooms might be a bit harsh for the poor player, don't you think? :P

Although I guess it's not sufficient to check if two nodes are connected (or "one player-held button away" connected) before changing one component of p, since if two nodes are only connected through p, p cannot be changed nicely since a portal shot cannot travel through another portal. A proper model would need to be a lot less hasty, but it's a start. Maybe in a more complex scenario an invariant could be found, like in the slide puzzle? [en.wikipedia.org]
I also can't help but wonder about a countable set of rooms with different fizzler rules beyond each button lowering its successor, haha.

Wow, cool ideas! I didn't expect to find something like this here. Fun to think about.
Maybe you could formalize all this by finding a good model, e.g. with a set of graphs. Maybe have V={1,2,3,...,n} be an ordered group of vertices representing rooms. Since cubes have no use other than lowering fizzlers, presumably each cube can be represented by an edge, E.g. the 3rd cube in the fifth room could be mapped to e_3 = (5,6). A move would create a different graph by a certain rule, e.g. "moving" one edge to another connected edge. Since portals are nothing more than a connection between rooms, there can be a final edge p which has slightly different rules of modification involving "line of sight" (Presumably through what nodes are connected).

@kwinten Thanks a lot for playing so many of these old easy maps of mine! Indeed, not all of them were top notch, but the further down the collection you get, the more interesting the puzzles become :]

Due to the laser angles possibilities, it probably doesn't work if some rooms are facing eachothers, so you could specifiy that the rooms have to be on line
otherwise cool "essay" hehe

@tapmage Yeah there is a reason why I stopped at N=2, otherwise it's just too boring and repetitive to actually solve. If you would try to solve the N=3 situation, in your head maybe, then you might find out in a more natural way where the equation comes from, because ultimately it is not that complex, just again, a little confusing :p

"add to the confusion and hence also to the difficulty". Yes I think you are right. The puzzle is not that difficult of itself but the similar looking rooms add to the confusion, which increases the difficulty. I had fun playing though, if I didn't I wouldn't have continued trying to solve it. Hmm but math. Wondering one thing. If N = 10 cubes, then the maximal number of rooms is 122. Does there come a point when "maximal" is a little TOO maximal? That would take forever to play. Time to play limits the equation. Not that I'll pretend to understand how the equation was derived but when I used it, for say 10 cubes, the complexity magnifies more than the number of rooms perhaps. Well just a possible observation. With that in mind what is the maximal number of rooms people want to play? Well 3 cubes is 17 rooms, 4 cubes is 26 rooms. So... probably something like 17. I find the application of math interesting but its probably limited to real life application or whatever.

@tapmage Thanks for playing. I personally do not think the puzzle is very complex in and of itself, but the many similar looking rooms add to the confusion and hence also to the difficulty. I designed this map as the result of a thought-experiment which is outlined in the text above the second question. The rest of the description is just a resolution to that question. I don't usually apply math to my puzzle logic (although I have tried many times :P)

I don't think anyone but Portal veterans will solve the puzzle, meaning it'll be difficult for most. The difficulty is at least 4/10. I had trouble at first but got it eventually, well between playing 30 to 60 min over the last few days (once I start getting sleepy though, I can't play anymore lol). Today it was easy for some reason, guess I acclimated to the puzzle or something. Anyway, I got lost by the math though in the description. Are you saying you apply math to your puzzle logic?

@GraveNoX Thanks for playing! Yep, quite easy indeed. If you enjoy being challenged, I have a lot of more difficult puzzles in my workshop, which could interest you :]

@Spider_Dawg Haha thanks :) This map merely exists because of the mildly interesting description for a selected few nerds

That was a fun way to kill several minutes, not difficult once picking up on the Al Gore Rhythm.

@Winnie Wheatley Thanks for playing once more :D

Excellent and fun map. Enjoyed playing. Thumbs up.

@PhilFromFrance Thank you very much! The description is indeed a lot more complicated than the actual map :p

Still a very good puzzle. In fact it was not too complicated (I was expecting worse by seeing the description). Good ambient music too. Favorite

@Leomievs Thanks! I just uploaded another funky map, but now I think I'll return to regular maps again :P

Well that was interesting, as a matter of fact I didn't feel like playing a hard map anyway so it was a fun one to solve :)

@bullfrog Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it :]

I Really enjoyed this, especially the third room - thumbs up. I'll leave it to others to prove, or disprove your theorem ;)

Cool stuff. For some reason I found the 3rd room easier than the second. Thumbs up.

@Nobody No-One Naw, Sheaf's description was crazier
@Teo Thanks; I'm wondering whether different 'rules' can give vastly different answers.
@jandlml Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed the map regardless :]
@quaternary Yeah I knew that the last puzzle in this map technically violates the rules with portal surfaces and visibility, but as you said, it doesn't really matter, since the (likely to be) optimal solution never requires the player to see farther than into the next room. You can also freely remove many portal surfaces; as long as you are able to get all cubes back to the beginning. By removing the right ones, you might actually be able to force a whole lot more cube shuffing. That is actually quite interesting to think about... I'm glad you think my guess is correct :D
@Narkodes Yeah like I said, this isn't really about the puzzle but it was more of a theoretical exploration into the possibilities

I enjoyed it, although I'm not the biggest fan of such barren chambers. It's too confusing for my little brain when there are a ton of similar looking rooms. Thumbs up.

After playing around with it in the editor and building up the n = 3 case, I'm pretty convinced that your guess is correct. I'm also sure that there's only one way to construct the best-case puzzle for any given N (besides permuting the cube droppers around)

Generalized "Uhh". I like it.

Little observation: the 7th room in N=2 is missing portal surfaces, so it doesn't strictly fit the definition, but since you can only reach it in the second stage of the solution where you can't use portals anyways it doesn't change much. Also I wonder if room visibility matters much, because in the n=2 puzzle you can't sometimes see between rooms you "should" be able to see between because of turning the corner, but it also doesn't affect the solution *in this case*

i was so sure i was not going to be able to get out of this map/math problem. i hate to say i dont understand the mathematics that went into creating this but i definitely enjoyed making my way through it.

cool concept, it's interesting seeing equations applied to puzzle logic

crazy description