Goin' BioFast in BioForge: Figuring out those darn light puzzles

Basically I wanted to use linear algebra to solve the lights out puzzles and couldn't, but I'm able to understand the logic a little bit better now. I think there would be a way to solve the first puzzle with math but it didn't click into place for me yet, the second puzzle wouldn't be able to be solved with linear algebra no matter what so I respect the devs for putting together an interesting puzzle. Here's that video I pulled up: • Week 4 - Solving 3 x 3...

[@liquidsteak2612]

Nice stuff! I don't know anything about linear algebra, so when I started out I used what little java programming knowledge I had to create a list of every unique state in the game and score it from its distance in moves from the win condition. It'd then take an input of a list of numbers representing the lights that were on in the initial state, find that state in the list, and then map a route through the states to the win condition. This was when I was the only person running BioForge, and I think once I was actually competing against others I stopped and learned how to solve it manually as I didn't have the smarts to make the tool available to everyone. My approach since then has been to learn combinations of button presses that flip only specific lights and no others (somewhat inspired by rubix cube algorithms I guess), which keeps it to an average of around 8-12 button presses, a little above the ideal average of 5, but I don't have to go outside the game or anything.
I'm pretty sure every button in the O-Ring puzzle has a unique effect, so if I'm understanding the premise the linear algebra solution should work, it might have just been a typo or something?
As for the two lines puzzle I think the only thing that might have been giving you trouble here is that the reset button doesn't reset the "last button pressed" value to the centre button.

[@CaptainFram]

I love deep dives into the minutia of this stuff. Neat!