Company Announces $30,000 Prize For Solving iPhone Game

dlpasco writes "Puzzllotto. The game, styled after titles such as Myst and Zork, will be available in the iPhone App Store later this week for $4.99. 10% of the sales revenue from the game will go to the Madagascar Fauna Group. At this point, only US citizens may participate in the contest but it has been stated that UL wishes to make future events world wide. 'Even though Puzzllotto represents a significant investment of engineering and legal resources, the company refuses to apply for patents on any invention. Instead, the company hopes to share its investment with other developers through its fundware.info site, while the company's ten employees hope Puzzllotto will raise enough money to capitalize bigger dreams.'" This could also be seen as a test for greed, since the prize money will only start at $1,000 and will grow by $1,000 each day for 30 days, at which point, if no one has solved it, the entire pot will be donated to charity.

Comments

Link omitted

[CaptainPatent]

This appears to be the most relevant site and it includes game rules. This does appear to be blatant Slashvertizing though and should probably be on the Idle page.

Programatically solvable?

[jonaskoelker]

Giving money to puzzle solvers has happened before. See for instance The Eternity Puzzle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_puzzle).

It'd be great if the product's home page said something about the rules of game, because then we could geek out and try to solve it programatically (if possible). It says "Puzzle" on the tin, but is it like playing Zelda or is it like the push-the-ice-blocks-around puzzle in Snowpeak Ruins from Zelda [roughly comparable to a small instance of Sokoban]?

Also, interesting, if this _is_ easy to solve programatically, we'd all be playing a big instance of something like the centipede game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_game).

Clearly you don't get it

[MisterSquid]

While in one month the company may not recover the cost of the prize, the possibility of generating enough of sales to earn a quarter of a million dollars is there.

Why do I mention $250,000? Because that's how much Steve Demeter's puzzle game Trism earned between 11 July and 18 September.

This mentioned by John Gruber on the very day.

My best guess is that if this prize money get the company many downloads, the company may easily make back it's money in the first week.