Be CrossCreative
xHCF4 - special edition - 6 portals, 2 agents
This structure amazes me in so many ways, that when i draw it on paper, my first though was - wow, so good, but sadly impossible.
And then -- hmm, is it really impossible? There was this matryoshka event going on, so maybe it can be done from inside. And the big limitation i have when speaking crosses - i have to plan for only 2 agents.
Later i realized it can be a hcf too, of level 4. With 2 agents - 1 cross - you can only make a hcf3. For a hcf4 you need 4 agents, or of course stick 3 hcf3 together, but that is totally not where i was going.
So this one is to be a hcf4 with just 2 agents and just 6 portals. What it needs are 3 crosses, but for that to work they have to be successful one after another. If you fail at the 2nd or 3rd you have to start over almost from scratch. And with every portal involved in more then one cross, a successful cross is one step forward, but а fail is two backwards.
To be more fun i fixed the portals involved so we can get a good symmetrical shape and when you virus one and then fail again you know this one is already immune so give up or wait for another hour. So it took a lot of viruses, like more than 10 on the 4 different days (instead of waiting the hour we just postpone for another day) and i dont know the exact number of fails and i dont want really to go back in the logs to count them.
On the 3rd date we failed enough times but managed to do 2 consecutive crosses to fail on the third again, so i almost gave up. Later that day while staring at the atomic clock app we are using i realized it is not consistent in its seconds - they were going forth and back and it hit me, the app may lag and the time you see may not be the real atomic time. It synchronizes somewhere between the seconds, but that was not good enough for us.
On the 4th date - may, 14th - we both removed the atomic clock app, laid the phones close to each other and synchronized them by hand. Once we were convinced they stick together on the second (visually) we just threw the links on a agreed time each and that was it - 3 consecutive successful crosses. WIN!
Thanks to @Riosor for the first day tries, we learn with every fail :)
And big thanks to @KERBEROSDOG for not letting me give up and for making it a success.
1st cross:
2021-05-14 12:14:37.840 <KERBEROSDOG>
2021-05-14 12:14:37.877 <EdinDen>
# 37ms
2nd cross:
2021-05-14 12:17:37.584 <EdinDen>
2021-05-14 12:17:38.050 <KERBEROSDOG>
# 466ms
3rd cross:
2021-05-14 12:25:37.892 <EdinDen>
2021-05-14 12:25:37.900 <KERBEROSDOG>
# 8ms !!! - this is the real winner :)
