Puzzle 65: Abuse of the Rules

BWG Loop Draw a loop visiting all cells that moves only horizontally and vertically, and turns only at centers of cells. Between two circles of the same color (both black or both white), there may not be any turn. Between two circles of different colors (one black and one white), there must be exactly one turn. (The loop is free to turn on circles.) A gray circle stands for either black or white, and might be different for the two segments it’s adjacent to (it might act as black for one direction and white on the other direction).

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

Puzzle 65: Abuse of the Rules
BWG Loop

(image seems bad; click to view full image)

God how long has this blog been without puzzles. Here’s a quick puzzle to fix for that.

This puzzle is made in response to IPC 2013. When I first saw Black-White-Gray Loop, this is my first impression. Of course, it turns out that the author is not this wicked, but it’s a neat abuse nevertheless.

Meanwhile, I got rid of all sorts of time and difficulty numbers. Now the difficulty is only “easy/medium/hard/insane”. Much better, because I can’t estimate difficulty properly. Solutions are now demand-based; I will not work on any solution unless someone comments/e-mails/notify me in some way or I like the puzzle too much that I want to publish a solution by myself. Much better time management for me.

I have another puzzle published in about 8 hours; stay tuned!

New Laptop

I have a new laptop. The previous laptop is still in service.

So, because I’m not that much into hardware, I’ll just say that it still suffices for me so far. I’m more concerned about the software.

I haven’t had time to get Microsoft Office. Either 2007 or 2010. So I’m using OpenOffice, but at the moment it looks terrible for making puzzle grids (I can’t set column width/row height in pixels argh, too lazy to keep converting from pixels to centimeters). Not to mention that I’m too used to MS Office’s ribbon menu. So don’t expect new puzzles for a while, until I get MS Office in.

Mother*****

(Before you accuse me of cursing, count the asterisks.)

Okay, so my computer seems to have a motherboard failure, since Tuesday. Which means I have had no computer access for three days, and depending on luck, I may or may not get computer access on IPC (7-9 July, aka 2 days). So…I might be solving by phone or something, depending on my mood and the eventual availability of my computer on the competition weekend. 😦

On a somewhat related note, no computer access makes me focus on solving puzzles and making them. I’ve solved Will Shortz’s Puzzlemaster Workout, with an average performance somewhere above expert time but definitely not record time (although I broke 19 record times, some of them in the “lucky” genres like Honey Islands and Boomerangs (I haven’t figured out a logical way to approach any of them, with brute force seeming to be the best method I found so far) but screwed up 5 puzzles). I’m catching up with Grandmaster Puzzles, and I might some time send some puzzles there; if I eventually send puzzles there, I already plan to send my vanilla and standard variant (is that an oxymoron?) puzzles to GMPuzzles and keep the more wicked variants for this blog. I’m making the second 7×7 Fillomino batch (the first is Fancy Fillomino February), which won’t be themed for a certain month but will be far more wicked than FFF. (Currently I’ve made Liar Cipher Fillomino and Consecutive Shikaku Fillomino, to give an idea of what puzzles I’m making. 😛 )

…alright, that’s all for now, I guess. Because it has been a long time since the last puzzle, let’s make a short one.

You have ten piles of coins, of sizes 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 (one pile each). You also have a pan. You can put any pile on the pan, but you must put all coins from the pile and no other coin from other piles. Design a sequence of piles and put the piles to the pan in that order, so that after any move, the total number of coins on the pan is not a prime number. There might be multiple sequences, but I’ve found at least one so this “puzzle” is solvable.

(An example sequence is 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, but it hits the prime 3 after two moves. Another sequence is 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, but it hits the prime 19 after two moves.)

If you found an answer, can you find one satisfying 1,_,3,_,5,_,7,_,9,_ where the underscores are to be replaced by the remaining numbers (2,4,6,8,10)?

What if you have 2013 piles whose sizes are the first 2013 positive integers instead? Can you find a way to construct the solution for any number of piles greater than or equal to 3 that always works (without trying too many possibilities of course)? (That is called a general solution.) Can you find a way to construct general solutions?

Whee.

You know the Liar variant where exactly one clue in each row/column is wrong? Okay.

You know the Cipher variant where all numbers are replaced with letters (identical numbers are replaced with identical numbers and different numbers are replaced with different letters)? Okay.

What happens if you combine both?

You say it’s impossible? Well, I also did say that when someone attempted to make it. But well… Yoshiap pulled it off.

Enjoy his Liar Cipher Fillomino. Let’s see whether I can make one of it too. Whee.

Puzzle 64…

Oh hey. Remember this?

No one has figured out the treasure yet. So I’ll give you some help. E-mail me with your progress and I will determine the best hint to point you at the right direction.

I think I’ll give anyone about two days between hints.

EDIT: Okay I think I accidentally made this ridiculously hard to pursue the uniqueness of the puzzle. Here are some large hints.

You’re supposed to observe the grid.

…however, R6C1 and R10C6 are put only for uniqueness, and you should treat them as not important while finding the treasure. There might be more, but all are disguised in the same way as R6C1 and R10C6. What it means requires one hint 😛

Special Puzzle 11: Canon and Gigue in D

Musical Marathon This is an optimization puzzle. Lay groups of notes on the grid and program a robot to move along a path. When the robot moves on top of a group of notes, the exact group of notes is played. When the robot moves on top of a cell without any group, the previous note is simply held. A group of notes is played for a quaver (half of a quarter, eighth of a measure), so the robot moves at the speed of two units per beat. The given score must be played precisely. The robot may not stop; they must move to an orthogonally adjacent square every quaver. Optimize by using the least number of notes.

Here is the puzzle (Canon and Gigue in D by Johann Pachelbel), and an example solution by me that is fairly optimized (31 notes):

Special Puzzle 11: Canon and Gigue in D
Musical Marathon
(MIDI if you want to listen instead of read)

The path is the following, starting from the black-bordered square (B indicates introducing the robot):
B↓←↑→↓←↑ / →↑↑←↑↑→→ / ←↓←↑→↓→→ / ↓→←↑↓↓←← / →↑←↓→↓↓→ / ←→→←←↓→→ / →↓↓→←←↑← / ↑→↓←←←←↓

(You can imagine it. Sadly I don’t have an applet to play it or something. I need to make some applets heh 😛 )

Yes, as you can see, I’m into optimization puzzles too. Also, I listen to too many songs and I recently (re)played SpaceChem, so…yeah.

I also have a 33-measure (264-quaver) song soon. I only need to create the score 😛

Tiltmaze 3: Sacrifices

Tiltmaze using fundamental objects, walls, cliffs, and boxes. And two balls. Both balls must be on goals at the same time to complete.

Difficulty 6.0/10 • Target moves 50 moves
Solution Answer (highlight →) ↓←↓→←↑←↑↓→←↑←↓→↑←↑→↑←↑←↓←↓←↑→↑→↓→↓←↓←↓←↓→↑←↓→↓→↑→↓

Tiltmaze 3: Sacrifices

Who says size represents difficulty? Good luck cracking this puzzle.

Tiltmaze is in some way similar to Sokoban (and all other interactive puzzles). You should always begin by figuring out what the difficult points are. Better yet, divide the puzzle to parts and solve each separately. Afterwards, handle all the small details, making sure that you don’t screw yourself up.

Tiltmaze 2: Divided By Two

Tiltmaze using fundamental objects, walls, cliffs, and boxes.

Difficulty 3.5/10 • Target moves 37 moves
Solutions
chaotic_iak’s answer (highlight →) ↓→↑←↓←↑↓→↑→↑→↑←↓→↓→↑←↑→↓←↑←↓→↓→↓↑→↑→↑
Wouter Fokkema’s answer (35 moves, highight →) ↓→↑←↓←↑↓→↓↑→↑→↑←↓→↑←→↓←↑←↓→↓→↓↑→↑→↑

Tiltmaze 2: Divided By Two

EDIT: Wouter Fokkema has obtained a 35-move solution, put above.

Another Tiltmaze. This thing is weirdly more fun to make, hence why I can post a lot. Or probably simply because I have many ideas now. Yes, you will now see when you also need to retract your moves. And this is getting messy to keep track of. I know 😛

Tiltmaze 1: The Plains

Tiltmaze using fundamental objects and walls.

Difficulty 2.0/10 • Target moves 23 moves
Solution Answer (highlight →) →↑→↓→↑←↑→↑→↑←↓←↑←↓←↑←↓→

Tiltmaze 1: The Plains

So…yeah. First Tiltmaze. This thing has haunted me for a long time (I even remembered when I made a fairly complex puzzle involving some mechanisms interlocked together), but I procrastinated making its JavaScript applet for too long. So screw it and let’s post puzzles as images. (Also, I lost all previous Tiltmaze puzzles. These are purely new.) I always imagine these puzzles as puzzles that don’t exactly require the target moves to be achieved in order to “complete” the puzzle, because these puzzles mostly need global-scale logic, with the exact details not completely necessary. You’ll see an example when I start introducing a few more objects that allow fun tricks.

If you think you have a solution, you can always send me the solution for me to verify. By hand. So I usually won’t respond to solutions that don’t break the target moves. However, if you have a proof that the target moves is impossible, do send it too so I can check my solution too.

Also, Puzzle 1 has a solution. Puzzle 1 is intended for newbies at Fillomino as a “final boss” before being an average competition-style Fillomino solver. 😀

Puzzle 64: Sunken Treasure

Battleships Put the given fleet to the grid so that no two ships are adjacent. Ships may be rotated, but not reflected. Ships may not be placed on blue squares (seas), and if there is a ship segment in the grid, it must be occupied by the exact same segment (same shape and orientation).

Difficulty 4.5/10 • Target times 01:00 02:30 07:30 20:00
Solution PNG (not uploaded) • PDF (not uploaded)

Puzzle 64: Sunken Treasure
Battleships

E-mail me the treasure (4-letter word) to get a free puzzle request (of reasonable size, aka 10×10 for the usual genres that I post). Don’t spam me. Only 5 requests offered.

Hint: There are two words, or to be precise two 4-character strings. One is supposed to be a check whether you are in the right track (if you find it and it makes sense, you’re in the right track; the treasure is the other one).

Meanwhile, this might probably be the last puzzle for a while, while I’m going to fix all previous puzzle posts to follow the current template.

EDITS:

Hint 1: You don’t need to solve the puzzle in order to find the treasure.