This guide aims to help you avoid opening Mimics by listing all the tips and tricks you’ll need in Mimic Logic.
Mimic Avoidance Guide
Mimic Logic is a game about making you think, develop and apply strategies to solve logic puzzles. If you follow this guide, you will skip the developing part, and just apply the strategies. Also, this guide doesn’t guarantee you will be able to open every non-mimic chest. There are times when there is not enough information to tell which chest is a mimic and which is not.
However the following tricks do guarantee that every chest you open is safe.
Glossary & Notes
- Validation: a sentence that says a chest or group of chests aren’t mimics.
- Accusation: a sentence that says a group of chests are mimics.
- Direct accusation: a sentence that says a specific chest is a mimic.
- Mimics remaining: refers to the mimics that are still unidentified.
Math:
- The letter ‘n’ is used to refer to a variable number. This way I can specify rules that apply for different cases. For example: If the rule says ‘there are n mimics…’, you have to replace n for the number of mimics in your puzzle.
Basic Tricks
Contradictions:
Condition: Two chests tell opposite sentences.
Conclusion: One must be a mimic and the other not.
Accusation:
- Condition: A chest directly accuses another chest of being a mimic.
- Conclusion: One must be a mimic and the other not.
Note: If the accusation is targeting a group, you can suspect there is at least one mimic among the involved chests (group + chest that accuses).
Self accusation:
- Condition: A chest accuses a group and it belongs to that same group.
- Conclusion: That chest isn’t a mimic.
Instant recognition:
- Condition:Only one mimic remains and a chest validates another chest (or group of chests without containing known mimics).
- Conclusion: Both the chest that validates and the validated chests are safe.
Note: This trick is really useful to speed run floors with only one mimic.
Coincidences:
- Condition: n chests say the same and are less than n unidentified mimics.
- Conclusion: The n chests are telling the truth.
Discarding:
- Condition: n mimics have to be identified and a chest is known to be a mimic.
- Conclusion: The rest of the puzzle can be played as if there were n – 1 mimics.
Note: In this picture the center chest is known to be a mimic, so the rest of the puzzle can be played as a 1 mimic puzzle. Since there is a contradiction, the remaining mimic is either the blue or the red chest. Thanks to that, I know the chests with green circles have no chance to be mimics.
Contradiction discarding:
- Condition: n mimics have to be identified and there is a contradiction between two chests.
- Conclusion: The rest of the puzzle can be played as if there were n – 1 mimics remaining (without trusting anything related to the suspicious chests).
Note: If the contradiction involves more than two chests, you must contemplate both possible cases and keep track of how many chests lie on each case. This way you can subtract the liars count to n. It can be a better idea to use the ‘Proof By Contradiction’ at this point.
Cyclic accusation:
- Condition: There is a cycle of direct accusation between n chests.
- Conclusion: The amount of mimics in the cycle are floor(n / 2) or ceil(n / 2).
Note: This condition rarely happens, and isn’t so useful.
50/50’s:
Sometimes there is not enough information to tell which chest is telling the truth and which one is lying. In these cases, it’s better to skip both chests. A ‘Blue Crystal’ can be used to find out which isn’t a mimic, but most of the time this is not worth it.
Strategies
Count Validations
You must count how many validations gets every chest (self-validations doesn’t count). I suggest you to use the right click to keep track of them.
“A chest is safe if its validation count is greater or equals to the amount of mimics remaining.”
Group them
The idea is to classify chests (as ‘1’ or ‘2’) by right-clicking their checkboxes.
Look for pairs of these types:
- A) If one is telling the truth, the other is lying. Mark one with ‘1’ and the other with ‘2’.
- B) If one is telling the truth, the other is too. Mark both with the same number.
Tricks to identify pairs:
A pair belongs to A) if there is an accusation or contradiction.
A pair belongs to B) if there is a validation or coincidence.
Start with one pair, and extend it by pairing a classified chest with a non-classified one.
If there are n mimics, and n + 1 chests classified with the same number. All n + 1 chests are telling the truth, therefor all the chest with the other number are lying.
Explanation:
- 1) The yellow pair is type A, because the right mimic accuses the left one. => Mark chests with different numbers.
- 2) The orange pair is type A, because the blue mimic accuses the red one. => Mark the red one with a different number than the blue.
- 3) The blue pair is type B, because both sentences say the same. => Mark the left one with the same number than the right one.
- 4) The purple pair is type B, because the lower chest validates the upper one. => Mark the lower chest with the same number than the upper one.
- 5) There are 4 chests classified with ‘1’, and only 2 mimics. => All the ‘1’ chests are safe and the ‘2’ chest is a mimic.
Look for suspicious chests
This strategy uses multiple tricks. You can get more details of each trick in the ‘Basic tricks’ section.
- First look for any contradiction and mark them with numbers.
- Then look for accusations, and mark involved chests.
Now you know where mimics might be. It’s time to apply the ‘Discard’ trick.
If you managed to guarantee all mimics are among the suspected chest, those free of suspicion are safe. In the other hand, if there are still mimics outside of the suspected groups, you can play the rest of the puzzle as if there were less mimics to find (ignoring the sentences related to the suspected chests)
Count Direct Accusations
Count how many direct accusations gets every chest (self-accusations means that chest isn’t a mimic). You can use right click to keep track of them.
“A chest is mimic if its direct accusation count is greater than the amount of mimics remaining.”
Note: This strategy uses Coincidence Trick, therefore all the chests that accused the mimic are safe.
Proof By Contradiction
This strategy consists in assuming a chest is either telling the truth or lying and continue the puzzle with that hypothesis.
If doing that leads you to a contradiction, for example, getting more mimics than it should be or two ‘supposedly safe’ chests contradicting each other, then you know the assumption you did at the start was wrong.
But what happens if after the assumption everything goes well? Then you lost your time, nothing assures your assumption was correct. You have to undo everything you did after the assumption. This is why it should be used as a last resource.
Demostrations
WIP..
