Experiment: Gems

The Gem Experiment

The Gem experiment is one of 12 experiments in the laboratory, available at laboratory tier 6.

The goal of the Gem Experiment is to fill the board with gems.

Mechanic

Clicking a tile rolls the tiles around the central tile in a + formation (Max is 5 tiles) into random icons. Roll time varies, from 1 second to 15 seconds.

You must complete the gem board 9 times in order to receive 1 stack.

Upgrades

• Lock chance: Chance to not re-roll a tile if the icon is a gem. Does not work on the tile being clicked, as in clicking a gem tile always re-rolls the tile.
• Gem chance: Chance for a tile to end up being a gem.

Rewards

Requirement	Reward
1 Stack	Lucky Shot
5 Stacks	Phasing
62.55M Gem Dust	+2500% Shipyard: Gem Rewards

Trivia

• Since it only matters to the player whether or not a particular tile is a gem and the grid has size 5x5, the grid can be seen as being in one of 2²⁵=33,554,432 distinguishable states. However, since any kind of rotation or reflection of the grid is ultimately inconsequential to a strategy for solving the experiment, any states that differ from each other merely by those means can be subsumed into one abstract state. This cuts down the size of the state space by almost a factor of 8 - 8 because an asymmetric grid has four rotations each in two reflections, almost because a few states are in some way symmetric and thus have less. The exact size of the state space after accounting for rotations and reflections is 4,211,744 (including the one goal state of full 25 gems) as determined by brute force search.