Which chip are you trying to use? The MC6000 has the extra "dat" register that you can use to store the state.

I'm using the mc6000, I can't find any useful way to store the previous state because -999 doesn't have a singular meaning so when you store that it's meaningless. I looked at the touch lamp design in the manual as I considered there to be similarities between them, but that one works because the input is continuous and doesn't have this -999 dummy state that means different things depending on the previous state.

I thought that tcp 0 pinname followed by conditionals might have been a good way to deal with the 3 inputs coming in, but once again -999 means different things at different times so it doesn't work.

Does the answer actually involving storing to both acc and dat? I can't imagine how that would work and I'd probably need way too much code to make it work.

Might just have to look up the answer because I don't have an other puzzles to try without doing so.

You don't store -999. It doesn't mean different things, it means nothing. You read it to acc and then throw it away. You don't use it for anything. You store the other values, 1 or 0, to "dat" as the state. 1 means pulsing, 0, means no pulsing.

ok well I just knocked that out in under a minute lol. Kind of funny when I think about how many hours I wasted trying to solve it for the last 2 days.

lol, yeah this game is like that. On some of the later puzzles I spent hours making complicated solutions only to then look at it the next day and immediately see how I was being dumb and could easily reduce my code by 50% or something silly.

Originally posted by Carton:

lol, yeah this game is like that. On some of the later puzzles I spent hours making complicated solutions only to then look at it the next day and immediately see how I was being dumb and could easily reduce my code by 50% or something silly.

Thanks for the hint btw. I'd gotten so stuck into thinking about solving it in a way that (despite knowing) was fundamentally flawed, I just couldn't give up on trying to brute force.

I've had this problem before in other areas of problem solving. Usually my intuition is very good and I go broadly in the right direction from the outset; the problem with that is when I do get it wrong I get stuck down a dead end and find it hard to accept that something doesn't work and look at it fresh again without pre-conceived ideas.