Question for someone who's seen all the levels: are you ever given a blank input? Not having to worry about that would make a lot of my designs simpler, if less rigorous.
PleasingFungus:
Thanks for the reply. My problem was mostly figuring out what everything did on the first few levels. For one thing, I wasn't using the conveyor belts correctly, ex I would try to turn a corner and the pieces would fall off the edge. Also, I didn't figure out that things didn't have to go in the unmarked end of the sorting nodes until relatively deep in. Basically, what would have helped a lot is seeing an example of a solved puzzle in each of the tutorial stages--"Here's what this part can do, now you try." A lot of times the game tells us what a part can do, but doesn't show it very well. Once I caught on though things were pretty intuitive, it was just that initial hump. I guess the only other thing is that I wasn't sure what the hotkey labels were for the parts at first--I thought they were the number I had in inventory until I noticed they didn't decrement as I used them.
Steep learning curve isn't helped by a sparse tutorial. Could use visual examples.
My programmer friend tells me that playing this is basically programming a Turing Machine...I asked her "how would you write a program to see if a bit string alternated between 0 and 1," thinking it was an analogous question to one of the levels, and it turns out it wasn't even an analogy, it was what was actually going on in that level, lol.
Haven't finished yet, but my initial impression is that the game is difficult, but rewarding.
I bought the ant sprayer, but the last time I reloaded it said ants had stolen some of my boosts.
Now that I think about it, I think I randomly had ants show up once after leaving the stadium for the main screen as well...
So apparently I got Greg's Fluffly slippers on the main menu? I clicked the little bars next to the SFX mute button and then hit the down arrow repeatedly. Maybe I double clicked too, not sure exactly what I did.
 "Musaic Box"){kind=icon}
 "Fracuum"){kind=icon}
 "Epic Battle Fantasy"){kind=icon}
 "Manufactoria"){kind=icon}
 "Anti-Idle: The Game"){kind=icon}
 "My Pet Protector"){kind=icon}
 "Cooking Mama Kills animals"){kind=icon}
 "Red Dot Escape 2"){kind=icon}