Solving the Puzzle

Today my friend, Sharad Katiyar sent me a mail, stating a challange for solving a puzzle which he was able to solve in just two minutes.

The puzzle description was pretty simple. There was a two dimensional maze (remember windows maze screen saver!). And I had to start driving a car from one entry and had to exit by abiding some constraints defined within the puzzle.

As the constraints was pretty hard and one can't remeber during driving his car, so for ease of that, puzzlemaker has made a .swf file and incorporated all the constraints within that.

This .swf file supposed to be executed with help of Macromedia Flash Player. But unlucky me! (or should i say myself lucky!). There was no Flash Player installed neither on my laptop nor on my machine. So i tried to open it with the one of the media players available on the machine. And i was successfully able to open that file. (There was no unsuppoted format file error!)

Now intresting thing happened, First few seconds (15-20) passed in understanding the puzzle. Then i tried to drive the car thorugh the help of arrow keys. But everytime something bad happened and i lost my control over the car i was driving. I tried to drive the car again by reseting it with the help of mouse, dragging the forward indicator to it's intial position.

But every thing was going in vain after couple of tries. At last (after 40 -60 seconds) I lost my patience and instead of concentrating on the puzzle, i just started to play with the forward indicator. At first I forwarded the indicator to extreme finish point, and i just noticed that car was also moved to somewhere else position from it's initial position at where I lost my concentration.

So now i was reversing the indicator to back slowly and found that at some place (60-65% forward from intial position) my car automatically was at the exit position. Hey!! Hey!! just a minute, Puzzle has been solved! And i was happy to solve that puzzle in less than two minute duration as my friend was challanging.

Now that was the time of (re)action, I immidiately replied my friend that there was nothing to be solved in the puzzle and described the quicker way to solve that puzzle.

I just received response from my friend Sharad Katiyar. He was very much dissapointed the way i solved the puzzle. He also suggested me the solution for playing the .swf file. But who cares now! Ulitmately solving the puzzle was the main motto. :)