Thesis Puzzle Generation – Pulley Information and Variations

October 17, 2019

Thesis Puzzle Generation

Pulley Variants

Pulley Wikipedia Page

Info #1 – Link

By: Wikipedia

Pulley

General

The wikipedia definition of a pulley is:
“a wheel on an axle or shaft that is designed to support movement and change of direction of a taut cable or belt, or transfer of power between the shaft and cable or belt”
The pulleys we will be generating are generally simpler setups. They mostly consist of a rope with a physics object (rigid body) on each end. This is because of how the system is used to create the pulleys. Ropes cannot be intertwined between objects accurately, so they are just generated above their setup locations and allowed to fall into position. As a final note, the pulley can also be tied into demonstrating the wheel and axle simple machine as well.

Varieties

Hook on an end to latch onto other objects

This focuses on the pulley’s inherent nature of changing the direction of force. The hooks allow the player to attach one end to various objects to move them into place. It could also be as simple as lifting other objects.

Object to move can be used as a platform

Focus on rotation of wheel

This would use the weight/friction of rope to rotate/spin the wheel that it is on while rope is moved. I am not sure how well the HFFWS system works with this.

Build a Compound Pulley

Since system does not allow for setup of complex block and tackle style pulleys, setup the environment for the player to build their own. This gets around the inability of the system itself by letting the player set it up. This would require building the environment in such a way (such as veritcal moving platforms or stairs around) to let the player move the rope through a series of wheels to build this pulley.

Lift Heavy Object

One end attached of the rope is fixed to a very heavy or massive object. The other end is where work is done to try to lift the heavy object. Examples of this could be a large door or simply a heavy platform. The system focuses on maximizing the overall force output. This will mostly be done by focusing on the free end of the rope, but applying an aiding upward force to the heavy mass may also be factored in.