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Comment by nanofortnight | Hacker News Reader

I found puzzles involving dialation to be quite annoying.

Consider this solution for the third puzzle of Transformation Puzzles 2:

  Reflection over the line from (1.5,-1.5) to (-1.5,1.5)
  Dilation of scale 256 about (2.5,2.5)
  Reflection over the line from (1.5,-1.5) to (-1.5,1.5)
  Dilation of scale 1/256 about (2.5,2.5)

You are unable to visibly discern a difference between the two shapes after this, but the interface refuses.

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First, I'm very sorry about that!

Second, wow, a scale factor of 256! Off the top of my head it might be numerical error building up. If that's the case, I'm very sorry. (It's also sometimes possible to get infinitesimally close to the target without technically reaching it mathematically, in which case the interface unfortunately looks like the answer is correct, when it's not.)

All of the puzzles are solvable with dilations of scales only 2 or 1/2.

I thought these were really great, and the UI was nice too, once I figured it out. Some minimal instructions might be helpful for someone thrown directly into the puzzles without having gone through whatever led up to them.

I ran into a situation where it seemed like there was no viable solution which kept the figure under manipulation within the visible bounds at all times, so it was made more difficult by having to visualize where it went offscreen in order to keep track of what I had to do next. It's entirely possible that I could refactor the operations into something that kept it onscreen the whole time, but I couldn't find it, so I really wanted a way to zoom out or pan around, or at least some encouragement like "this should be possible without the shape leaving the visible area." Maybe giving the user the ability to zoom out but also drawing a bounding box that shows the space you're expected to do the transformation in would help.

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