Lately I’ve been enjoying replaying through an iOS game that came out in 2015 called Super Sharp. With a lot of lateral thinking, patience, and luck, I’ve been optimizing the levels to solve them with as few cuts as possible.
I played through the game 6 years ago, and at that time I thought I had optimized my solutions pretty well, but this time around I was able to reduce my total by 32 additional cuts. In some cases I was just more persistent than I had been last time, but it also involved coming up with several new strategies, such as:
- In one case, after waiting a minute and a half, the level solves itself without using any cuts! (4-10)
- In some levels, using the iPhone’s Reachability allows you to make cuts that have one end on the screen, and one end above the top of the level. I found two levels where this was useful, (5-1, 5-3). (You can also make cuts that go off the bottom, but I never found that useful)
- When an object’s momentum would cause it to collide with another object between frames, the physics engine has to decide how to resolve the issue. When an object is moving fast enough, this can sometimes cause results that are inconsistent with normal physics. (2-14)
There are only a few levels that I think might be possible to reduce further. If you improve on any of the solutions, let me know!