More Tiny Puzzles

Update on 20-Aug: New cryptics.

I’m so terrible at keeping my blog updated, eh. Here’s a not-so-standard logic puzzle and two standard not-logic puzzles.

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Snake Locate a snake in the grid. The snake is a sequence of shaded cells that do not touch itself; that is, if two cells share a side, then they are consecutive cells in the snake, and if two cells share a corner (but not a side), then they are separated by one other cell in the snake. Clues outside the grid tell how many cells in that row/column are part of the snake.

…except, my grid got scrambled. The grid is 5×5. I know the endpoints of the snake are on R1C1 and R1C3. I also remember putting five 4’s to the grid, although I’m not sure in which rows/columns. (A row/column only gets one clue.) Can you solve it anyway?

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Cryptic crossword clue Well, what it says. Here in the Patzers Club Discord server, for some reason there are a bunch of cryptic clues being thrown about, and I end up making a few. Most of them are easy. Some of them might be unfair, although I tried ditching everything that Patzers Club considered unfair, so hopefully all here are clean.

• Bathing resort in a country (5)
• Finished in Indonesian (4)
• Flipped picture made unique puzzle (4)
• He can’t smile without the middle figure-eight (10)
• Irregular dragon skin endlessly new (7)
• No other mother had the first half stack of hay (3)
• One’s neighbor tinkers with one’s initials (3)
• Olahraga mulai setengah enam (5) (This is an Indonesian cryptic. The surface reading roughly translates to “sport starts at half to six”.)

Puzzle 92: Word Puzzle?!

Bonza Word Puzzle Arrange the pieces given into a crossword pattern, like in the game (or puzzle genre) Scrabble, such that every contiguous sequence of two or more letters read left-to-right or top-to-bottom spells out a word, which are thematically linked. Also see Grant’s take on this.

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

Puzzle 92: Word Puzzle?!
Bonza Word Puzzle

Let’s say I’m not too inspired.

On the other hand, I actually have the game. Of course, I’m always biased, preferring free games way more than games that include necessary in-app purchases (this includes Bonza for locking some of its puzzles, even if there are packs available with coins), but I suppose I should stop here before trashing more on the business model which I myself can’t understand why I loathe so much. The idea itself about “jigsaw crossword” is amazing. (By the way, I should have put the genre name as “Jigsaw Crossword” if I want to be neutral, but eh.) I might tinker with the idea again some time in the future.

Puzzle 86: Scarcity

Pure Loop Loop: Draw a loop that passes all white cells and no black cell such that the loop goes horizontally or vertically at all times and never touches or crosses itself.

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

Puzzle 86: Scarcity
Pure Loop
(click to enlarge)

Page 12 of Chessics #12 states that a 8×8 Pure Loop puzzle only needs four black squares to assure uniqueness of the solution, and page 143 of The Games and Puzzles Journal #8-9 states that with an addition of rows and columns (and black squares), the solution can be extended. However, I don’t find anything about how many extra black squares are necessary, so here I’ll give an upper bound: a Pure Loop needs at most black squares to ensure a unique solution. In fact, the result can be generalized to a rectangle: a Pure Loop needs at most black squares to ensure a unique solution (although obviously this is weak if is small compared to ). Is there anything stronger?

Puzzle 78: Totally Not An Approval

Scrabble Example

Scrabble Put some letters into the grid. The words that can be read (a span of two or more letters, preceded and followed by either the edge of the grid or a blank space) must be listed on the right, and no other word can be formed. All letters must form a single connected region.

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

Puzzle 78: Totally Not An Approval
Scrabble

So Prasanna asked me to testsolve a Scrabble puzzle, with a word bank that resembles a sentence but has broken grammar. I suddenly got the idea for this word bank (which, Prasanna, has a perfect grammar, even if it uses a slang (v.intr. definition #4) 😛 ), and quickly whipped this puzzle in head. Turns out it’s unique, so why not. It’s actually Easy-Medium or something, as it’s not that trivial, but heck whatever.

Aftermath: Prasanna went hyper.

Also I went on to replace Puzzle 5; nobody noticed “the second path goes nowhere” and “the second path leads to freedom” are two contradictory statements?

Puzzle 75: TomTom is NP-complete

This post has two puzzles!

Latin Square Put an integer between 1 and the length of the grid (5) inclusive such that each row/column has each number exactly once.

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

Puzzle 75: TomTom is NP-complete
Latin Square

TomTom Put an integer between 1 and the length of the grid (10) inclusive such that each row/column has each number exactly once. The number at the top-left of each region indicates the value of a mathematical operation (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) applied successively to all digits in the cage, starting with the largest digit for subtraction and division (e.g. 1,2,4 with subtraction is a 1- clue as 4-2-1 = 1). (Description from Grandmaster Puzzles)

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

Puzzle 75: TomTom is NP-complete
TomTom

I guess the two puzzles above prove that TomTom is NP-complete. We can see a trivial polynomial transformation from a Latin Square to a TomTom, and Latin Square is NP-complete.

So, sorry for Jacob Lance.

Puzzle 73: Simple?

Pure Loop This is a loop style puzzle. The loop passes all white cells and no black cells.

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

Puzzle 73: Simple?
Pure Loop

What the heck am I doing here…

UPDATE 14-Mar-2014: I just realized this puzzle type is called “Pure Loop”; Simple Loop is where you’re given some segments of the loop and must pass all squares/dots.

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!

Puzzle 59: A Random Puzzle

Tapa Shade some cells black so the black cells form a single polyomino. A cell containing numbers may not be shaded black. Numbers in a cell indicate the length of connected black cells around the cell (cells that share a vertex with it). If there are at least two numbers, they must be separated by at least one white cell. A question mark stands for some non-zero number, and it might not be consistent across the puzzle.

Difficulty 2.0/10 Master time 2:00 Expert time 3:30

Puzzle 59: A Random Puzzle
Tapa

So I’m feeling really uninspired for today.

Oh wait, I missed something.

Answer key: Count the number of black cells.

…answer key? Wait, something is not right here.

EDIT: Puzzle edited. If you have just started though, it might not be of your concern.

Puzzle 58: That Classic Board Game

Mastermind There is a hidden 5-digit string, where its characters are among 1-9 only, but the characters may repeat. The objective is to discover this string. There are several guesses that has been made about the string. Each guess is a string of the same length and from the same character set, and its response is a number of black circles and/or white circles (might be none). A black circle indicates a character that exists in the hidden string and is on the correct position, while a white circle indicates a character that exists in the hidden string but is not on the correct position. For example, if the hidden string is 11223 and the guess is 13123, three black circles for the first 1, the 2, and the last 3, and a white circle for the other 1 will be awarded.

Difficulty 1.5/10 Master time 0:20 Expert time 0:50

Puzzle 58: That Classic Board Game
Mastermind

Whee. This thing is easy to make in head. This puzzle, not this genre. I’m sure it’s possible to make a difficult puzzle in this genre.

Also, note that Puzzle 57 has reached the fifth version, which I hope to be unique.

Finally, stay tuned. I’ll post one or two more puzzles soon.

FFF 24: Warping and Wrapping

Fancy Fillomino February: This is a series of 28 (twenty-eight) 7×7 Fillomino puzzles over the February. Every 00.00 UTC+7 a new puzzle will be up. The basic Fillomino rules apply unless otherwise indicated.

Toroidal Fillomino In addition to the regular Fillomino rules, the grid is toroidal. The top and the bottom sides are connected, and so are the left and the right sides.

Difficulty 2.0/10 Master target 0:30 Expert target 1:30

FFF24: Warping and Wrapping
Toroidal Fillomino

Sky is bored. Whipping up a simple variant of Fillomino.