The Incredible Machine

April 7, 2024 2:37 PM

xkcd #2916: Machine

If you're lost, explainxkcd explains:

Upon loading the page, you are presented with marbles being added to a box by geared wheels, with a button to open a “tool panel”. You are encouraged by Cueball to direct the marbles into a little “output” gear, and that marbles have a lifespan of 30 seconds to reduce clutter. There are large and small boards available for use, as well as some gimmicky stuff like prisms (which deflect marbles) and fans (that blow marbles around).

The comic starts in a main screen where the user can create a Rube Goldberg machine in a "Cell" where the goal is to route a constant stream of colored balls from an input on the ceiling or a wall to outputs of a matching color on the walls or floor. After the comic is first opened a window pops up over the machine where Cueball in a lab coat tells you to route the balls from the inputs to the outputs. If any balls are left in your cell for more than 30 seconds, they fade away. The first time a ball fades away another popup informs you that the balls are removed for security reasons. When you have built a machine which succeeds in routing enough balls to the output, a popup will prompt you to submit your cell to be added to the public machine.

The button in the bottom right corner brings you to a page where you can drag around to view all of the machines that have been submitted, with a title for each in the upper left corner. In this view you can see that all of the outputs are also inputs for another cell

See also: The Incredible Machine (1993), interactive Rube Goldberg machines, and the classic Blue Ball Machine (background - previously)

posted by Rhaomi (25 comments total)

WOW.

This is just so cool. I love that you can do things like this right in the browser these days.

I love Randall Munroe and XKCD.

Thank you so much for posting this, Rhaomi!
posted by kristi at 2:47 PM on April 7 [9 favorites]

I spent many happy hours as a kid playing The Even More Incredible Machine. This brings back fond memories. All those poor Mels eaten by alligators...
posted by biogeo at 2:48 PM on April 7 [3 favorites]

A bit of a pain on mobile; off to the desktop!
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:01 PM on April 7 [1 favorite]

I've made probably six or seven of these since the comic debuted yesterday. Unsurprisingly, I have no idea how many hours I lost to The Incredible Machine as a kid.
posted by Navelgazer at 3:12 PM on April 7 [1 favorite]

Reporting back. Be sure to scroll down on the parts bar; there is a lot more going on! (Also, I find the cat hilarious.)
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:14 PM on April 7 [2 favorites]

What does the squirrel do?
posted by suelac at 3:32 PM on April 7

You can 'pass' while still sometimes sending incorrect colors through. Amusingly, since your machine is connected to others, you may have highly mixed color sources.
posted by Johnny Lawn and Garden at 4:28 PM on April 7

I'm happy that Randal Munroe still makes these things, and XKCD, even if it doesn't seem like it has the same reach as it once did. A lot like Metafilter.
posted by JHarris at 4:56 PM on April 7 [12 favorites]

Usually these wild interactive XKCDs are released on April 1; I suppose this one needed a little more TLC before it was ready.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 5:10 PM on April 7 [1 favorite]

One of the less obvious things: different colors of ball have different physical properties. There are panels that mix the different colors together and then sort them out afterwards.
posted by baf at 5:19 PM on April 7 [5 favorites]

Contraption Maker is the modern (released in 2014) version of The Incredible Machine, if you're interested in something you can play on computers without an emulator. It's ten bucks on Steam.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:00 PM on April 7 [6 favorites]

Sounds cool, but it does not appear to work on my admittedly-old iPad. All I see are the little color balls. I’ll have to check this out tomorrow on my desktop.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:07 PM on April 7

I couldn't figure out how to get all the red Xes to turn to green checks, even with no ball overflow. I had no idea how I was supposed to know which color balls were supposed to go where, and it seems like once I clicked off an item, I couldn't get the menu back that would allow me to delete an item. I could still move and rotate them, but I couldn't get the delete option except on a new item I hadn't committed yet.

Also, I was a lot more excited when I thought I was trying to direct the balls toward the octopus than when I discovered it wanted me to direct them toward the outputs.
posted by cats of formaldehyde at 8:45 PM on April 7 [1 favorite]

the output grinders have little triangles next them that are (a little too subtly) colored according to the balls it wants.
posted by rifflesby at 9:37 PM on April 7 [1 favorite]

If you want to try a 3D version, Fantastic Contraption lets you assemble weird carts in VR to try to deliver the target to the goal zone. It’s delightfully cartoony with a, well, fantastic interface that has you pulling components out of a backpack while walking around the assemblage. If you have a headset I would strongly recommend trying it!
posted by autopilot at 10:28 PM on April 7 [1 favorite]

Grr, small travel laptop does not fit the machine, or vice versa.
posted by sammyo at 1:11 AM on April 8

This was fun! I made a very simple machine and submitted it before I realized it would go into the mega-machine with other peoples' much cooler contraptions!
posted by Harald74 at 9:14 AM on April 8

So much fun! I didn't realize that you could scroll the items at first, so my initial machines were rather boring. The inclusion of cats definitely made things interesting!
posted by lock robster at 9:47 AM on April 8 [1 favorite]

Are all the machines in the mega-machine user-submitted? Are those just the machines that have been sucessful so far? Does everyone get the same assignment in terms of inputs and outputs or do you get a different assignment if you load the page after the last successful assignment? Do they update in batches of 12 or 43?

In case anyone's wondering, when I load this I see 516 machines inside the machine (the x-coordinate in the URL goes from 0 to 11, and the y-coordinate in the URL goes from 0 to 42, so it's a 12x43 grid).
posted by subdee at 10:32 AM on April 8

Oh you can reload the page and it'll give you a different assignment of inputs and outputs. Guess it works a column or a row at a time then, once the whole column or row is solved it'll go into the machine.
posted by subdee at 10:38 AM on April 8

And since this is a nerd thing, I'm guessing it fills up once the grid gets to 42x42, so a total of 43 squared or 1849 machines? Maybe with the final outputs looping back to the start?
posted by subdee at 10:41 AM on April 8

No wait I see the construction tape for the empty cells now... so it's a max of 516 machines... I guess there's some kind of manual review, and only the cool ones go in.
posted by subdee at 10:53 AM on April 8

I've always enjoyed the 3D Rube Goldberg Machines (YouTube; pwnisher), or the various LEGO Great Ball Contraptions (YouTube), both of which seem relevant.
posted by Dez at 2:39 PM on April 8

Build it and they will BONK, both in the sidebar and the Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:38 AM on April 12

It wasn't very obvious that you could scroll around to see neighbouring cells. Before I found out about that I wasn't very taken with this, but the fact all the cells are connected makes this really cool.
posted by mokey at 4:36 AM on April 20