At least there's another game in Borderlands 3 to play

At least there’s another game in Borderlands 3 to play There’s a new mini-game in Borderlands 3. If you go to the infirmary in Sanctuary III, you can find an arcade machine with Borderlands Science, a matching puzzle game that can unlock cosmetic doodads for your character as well as some in-game temporary XP or money boosts. It’s all in the name of real science, as Mayim Bialik explains in the intro video. The simple matching game ties into the Microsetta Initiative’s effort to map strands of DNA in poop. Yes, dookie. It turns out computers aren’t great at lining up the sometimes vague data from our doo-doo, and players can contribute to the task by simply being better at guessing. It’s not always possible to line up all of the tiles correctly, but attempting these puzzles is still helpful as you’re identifying errors in real-world computer analyses. Congratulations, vault-hunter. You’re a real science person now.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2020/04/07/at-least-theres-another-game-in-borderlands-3-to-play/

I really don’t see how I would perform better at the task in the game than my computer would with just a few percentage points of computing power.

I’ve been wondering about that too. At least the first few levels (Claptrap and Brick’s challenges) have a really restricted set of possible move. It’s not credible that the entire set of possible moves couldn’t be exhaustively searched faster than I can reach a score greater than the target.

Also, it’s a little annoying that the ppl in Sanctuary won’t shut up in the hallway while I’m trying to work on these, since the subtitles line up to the bottom row. :/

But the intent is cool anyway… does anyone know if the later challenges are more complex?

I don’t know if “complex” is the right word, but later challenges do get a lot more interesting. The columns widen, the blocks you can use are more tightly doled out, and getting the higher scores depend a lot on maximizing optional combinations of rows.