Puzzle 95: Logicsmith v2.0

Fillomino Read here for instructions.

Expected difficulty Hard • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published

Puzzle 95: Logicsmith v2.0
Fillomino

Four years ago (okay, 45 months ago), there’s Logicsmith Exhibition, back when Grant was still active on his blog (before he migrated to Grandmaster Puzzles). Back then, I was still starting at constructing logic puzzles; you can see my submission there. Here is a “revamped” version: exactly the same layout as before, and each of 1-9 appears exactly four times as in the competition.

…okay, I just got this theme idea and toyed with it, to liven up my blog again.

Puzzle 90: Antimatter

Dual Masyu Follow regular Masyu rules. This is a loop puzzle: Draw a loop that passes some of the cells such that the loop never touches or crosses itself, the loop only turns on cell centers, and the loop only makes 90-degree turns. The loop must pass all circles. When it passes a white circle, it must go straight, but must turn either before or after (or both). When it passes a black circle, it must turn, but must go straight both before and after it.

Additionally, this puzzle is two in one; it has two solutions that are coupled in the following way. Gray circles are two circles that have different colors in the two puzzles; if a gray circle acts as a white circle in one puzzle, then it must be black in the other, and vice versa. (In either puzzle, two gray circles may act as one white and one black; they don’t need to act as the same color.)

Expected difficulty Medium • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published

Puzzle 90: Antimatter
Dual Masyu

No particular comment; just toying with interesting things.

Puzzle 89: Three-Four-Five

Fillomino Read here for instructions.

Expected difficulty Medium • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published

Puzzle 89: Three-Four-Five
Fillomino

Just a classic Fillomino to fill my blog. No particular reason of why I have that theme; I was constructing the opening and saw that I only used the digits 3,4,5, so I went ahead and set it as the theme. Also, it took me more time to get the particular ending I wanted… Spoiler: [If the place rotationally symmetric to where you did the opening is also where you feel like doing the same trick again, then you get my intention. And yes, I wanted to force both the bottom-left and top-right corners to end in that way.]

Now back to doing homework.

Puzzle 88: I Give Up

Masyu Loop: Draw a loop that passes all the circles. Whenever the loop passes a white circle, it must go straight, but turns either before or after the circle (or both). Whenever the loop passes a black circle, it must turn, but go straight on both before and after the circle.

Expected difficulty Medium • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published

Puzzle 88: I Give Up
Masyu

This puzzle was intended to be completely antisymmetric and has the same (okay, mirrored) pattern of givens as this puzzle. Turns out both objectives aren’t met. I give up tweaking it, hence the name.

Puzzle 84: Chopsticks

Hashiwokakero Draw some bridges connecting the islands (circles). Bridges can only run horizontally or vertically, and all islands must be connected (it must be possible to visit any island by using the bridges). Bridges cannot cross each other. Between any two islands, there may be at most two direct bridges connecting them. A number on an island gives the number of bridges connected to that island.

Expected difficulty Hard • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published

Puzzle 84: Chopsticks
Hashiwokakero

Because “hashi” can mean “chopsticks”. Fourth of the rejected series for FAST. The answer key would be “write 1 for every single bridge and 2 for every double bridge that crosses/goes along the marked rows”, with the two bottom rows as marked.

This is probably hard because you need to observe for the opening, a bit like the dreaded Hitori. Afterwards, I’d put it no more than a medium. And I hate making Hashi’s solution image; just check that answer when you’re done or something and guess how I made it.

Puzzle 82: 5×10

Heyawake Dynasty-style: Shade some cells black so that no two black cells are orthogonally adjacent and all white cells are connected. A number inside a black bordered region—a room—indicates the number of black cells in the room. A run of contiguous white cells in the same row/column cannot span over two room boundaries.

Expected difficulty Hard • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published

Puzzle 82: 5×10
Heyawake

Second rejected puzzle. As you can guess, some of the top rows would have become the answer keys, and the bottom part I still can’t figure out a logical solution for.

Three more to come. Also the ordering of how these puzzles appear is determined indirectly by Yoshiap, whose I simply asked “give a permutation of 1,2,3,4,5”. 😛

Puzzle 79: Hidden Object

Expected difficulty Hard • For personal reasons, I decide not to release the answer/solution for this puzzle. Sorry 😦

Puzzle 79: Hidden Object
Nonogram
(click to enlarge)

Ripple Effect is NP-complete

Ripple Effect is NP-complete. We reduce from 3-SAT.

Puzzle 72: Drunk Man

Short Yajilin Follow regular Yajilin rules: This is loop style puzzle. The loop may not pass through any gray cell. White cells not passed by the loop may not be orthogonally adjacent; note that a white cell not passed by the loop may still be orthogonally adjacent to a gray cell. A number with an arrow indicates the number of cells not passed by the loop, looking from the cell with the number in the arrow’s direction, up to the edge of the grid.

In addition, no straight segment of the loop may be more than two units long. In other words, whenever the loop goes straight through a cell, it must turn both before and after it.

Expected difficulty Medium-hard • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published

Puzzle 72: Drunk Man
Short Yajilin

Re title: Originally I wanted to give the variation name “Drunk Yajilin”, but that’s too weird. And well, drunk people can’t walk straight for long, or so the “usual” “sources” say.

Re difficulty: I consider hard. Prasanna says medium, close to hard. So let’s make it medium because Prasanna is more skilled and less biased (any author will be biased to their own works) than me.

Well… Not much comment, actually. My birthday is coming. All my puzzle projects (Fillomino crazy variants batch, Fillomino Variations pack, perhaps more that I don’t remember) are abandoned except for the upcoming LMI test in early 2014. Probably February, but not confirmed yet. I have homework and I make puzzles…

Puzzle 70: Mii~ >w<

Greater Than Fillomino Follow regular Fillomino rules. In addition, inequality signs appear on the grid; these signs must be satisfied by the numbers in the squares involved.

Expected difficulty Hard • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published

Puzzle 70: Mii~ >w<
Greater Than Fillomino
(Here for plain version)

So, as a “natural” follow-up of my current interest on roleplaying, this is obligatory. All givens form either the emoticon ^^ or <3. I wanted to include =3 (equals sign and 3, effectively two horizontally adjacent 3’s) but if I can use only two emoticons why not. I didn’t want to figure out what happens with only one emoticon though, this by itself is already difficult to construct…

Hard, yeah. Because a few parts are hard. But if I’d use the average, this would be somewhere around medium, because the easy parts are easy. And the puzzle breaks down nicely into parts. *insert obligatory reference to vore*

So! This puzzle is a gift for an RP friend that is curious about puzzles. He solved Puzzle 1, a puzzle I believe to be “final test to see whether you advance from beginner to intermediate Fillomino solver”. Even though he clocked 2 hours, this is a fabulous achievement for someone with no prior experience of logic puzzles. And so I felt really guilty when testsolving the puzzle; I found the puzzle to have the mentioned hard steps. There are even parts where my best method is still trial and error to some extent (read: “what-if”s), but hey. Who cares about time. Let’s see whether the aforementioned RP friend can solve this :3

And finally, yeah. Mii~ >w<