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)

Puzzle 71: Checkerboard Insanity

Tapa Region Party Follow regular Tapa rules: Do Nurikabe-style. (The black cells are called the Tapa wall.) Cells with numbers may not be black. Numbers in a cell indicate the sizes of the black square groups adjacent to the clue square; two separate black square groups must be separated by at least one white square.

In addition, Region Party variation apples. The two quadrants with blue cells and “C” at the top-left of the cells indicate Clones quadrants: The contents of the two quadrants must be identical on the blue cells. (There is no restriction for cells inside the quadrants that are not blue.) The two quadrants with red cells and “E” at the top-right of the cells indicate Extra Region. After tilting the grid by 45 degrees, the blackened cells on the red squares also form a Tapa wall. (Note that all red squares form a single region, not two separate regions.)

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

Puzzle 71: Checkerboard Insanity
Tapa Region Party

Perhaps the only puzzle among the most recent 20 or so that is made purely on computer, not using my puzzle scratch book. The difficulty is hard; I wanted to go with medium but the variant is pretty confusing on itself.

Anyway. What inspired me? The recent TVCs and CTC on LMI, of course. Plus me recalling that I’ve done this crazy variant before. :3

And…uh…this variant is hard >_< The best finish I’ve found is unsatisfactory. But fair enough for a puzzle I make in half hour or so.

I need to make some easy puzzles for my “mate”… Ideas?

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<

Puzzle 69: Foxger’s Hybrid

Sashikabe
Example puzzle and solution

Sashikabe Basically Sashigane and Nurikabe together. Shade some of the cells black so that the black cells form a Tapa wall (also known as a Nurikabe). The remaining white cells form several polyominoes each. Each polyomino must be of the shape of an L; formally, it is composed of an “elbow” of one square, with two “legs” of 1-cell width non-degenerate rectangles orthogonally adjacent to the elbow and are perpendicular to each other.

There are clues on the grid in form of arrows and circles; these squares must remain white. An arrow marks the end of some leg and shows the direction where the corresponding elbow is; for example, a left arrow means that a leg ends there and the elbow of that leg is located to the left of the square. A circle marks an elbow; a number inside a circle means that the polyomino containing that elbow has exactly that many squares.

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

Puzzle 69: Foxger’s Hybrid
Sashikabe

Yay, a puzzle! It’s rated hard solely because it’s a rather unusual genre.

So… What’s with the title? This genre is invented by Grant Fikes aka glmathgrant, and is pretty obviously a hybrid. In addition, Grant’s online persona (Grant Badger Fox) is also a hybrid (fox and badger), so you can call “Foxger [is] Hybrid”, using “hybrid” as an adjective. So, yeah, lame title. I can’t think of a better one though.

Also, as you can see, I attempted a perfectly symmetrical clue arrangement. Turns out I need to use a single circle there (luckily still preserving symmetry of layout, but not the contents), but I’m quite happy with the result as the solution itself is satisfying.

Why do I construct this? A request by mathgrant, of course! He made a Sashikabe puzzle and challenged me to make one too, so here it is. Turns out constructing these is a pain. Perhaps because I put the condition of making the clues perfectly symmetric, but hey, I tend to like perfect layouts.

Anyway. TVC XIV and CTC 2013 on Logic Masters India are going on! If you like Tapa, you should give both a try. The latter needs a consistent online schedule if you want to score high, but if you’re not into competitive stuff, you can still solve them for fun. They are pretty amazing puzzles. On the other hand, the former is part of TVC 2013, a 4-part contest of Tapa variations that has run since 2010. So yeah, two big events are running now.

On a more personal note. I’m currently in KAIST, as you should have known if you read this blog regularly (the latest post about my experience in KAIST has been up for about 4 days now). My Orientation Week has just ended, and seems like it’s not too busy…yet. The first academic week will start next Monday, so let’s see whether I still have time to construct puzzles or not…

Well, that’s all for now. Stay tuned!

EDIT 27 September 2013: Grant Fikes got his Sashikabe puzzle published! I’ve testsolved it and it’s a very nice puzzle. Also, this is one part of my thanks to Grant due to a certain personal problem that I prefer not to be shared with general public, but basically Grant helped me with my problem. A lot of help. Next part will come later. :3

Deception Preview 6: Wiggly Rooms

Surveyors Heyawake Shade some of the cells black. No two black cells may be orthogonally adjacent, and all white cells must form a single polyomino. No continuous line of white cells may span over two room borders. In addition, the following rules govern clues:

For clues inside the grid, each clue can tell either the number of black squares in the region it’s contained in, or the number of black squares adjacent to it (including the cell itself). It might be both.

For clues outside the grid, each clue can tell either the number of black squares in the row/column, or the length of some maximum continuous line of white cells (it cannot be extended, as in it is obstructed by either the grid’s edge or a black square; note that “maximum” doesn’t refer to the maximum length, but rather the nature of the line). It might be both.

Answer key: Enter the lengths of the lines of white cells in the marked row/column. If the row/column has all white cells, enter 0.

Difficulty 6.0/10 • Target times 03:00 07:00 15:00 1:00:00
Solution Answer key (highlight →) 12111,133 • PNG (not uploaded) • ZIP of PDF (not uploaded) • DOCX (not uploaded)

Deception Preview 6: Wiggly Rooms
Surveyors Heyawake

Sixth preview puzzle. Do you note that each of 2,3,4,5 appears exactly once in the grid and exactly once outside the grid? That was a theme, but a minor one. The major one is the obvious “wiggly” rooms everywhere, which is a pain to make with MS Excel.

Deception Preview 4: A Tribute to The Foxger

Cipher Fillomino Follow Fillomino rules. In addition, each letter stands for some number. Same letters represent the same number and different letters represent different numbers.

Answer key: Enter the unit digits (last digits) of the numbers in the cells in the row/column.

Difficulty 5.5/10 • Target times 02:30 05:00 10:00 35:00
Solution Answer key (highlight →) 7655373322,2241444242 • PNG (not uploaded) • ZIP of PDF (not uploaded) • DOCX (not uploaded)

Deception Preview 4: A Tribute to The Foxger
Cipher Fillomino

Fourth preview puzzle. A tribute to mathgrant (or perhaps here), which is the most influential person for me about logic puzzles. There are just so many things he did to get me hooked on logic puzzles, and he has helped me on numerous occasions, the most recent one is being a testsolver for this Deception test. 😀

Puzzle 57: Ridiculous Changes

Fillomino Operations Divide the grid into polyominoes. Fill each cell inside a polyomino by the size of the polyomino, after applying all mathematical operations it contains (multiplication/division before addition/subtraction). For example, a 5-square polyomino containing -3 and ×2 will have the number 5×2-3 = 7 on each of its cells. Polyominoes that contain the same number may not be orthogonally adjacent.

Difficulty 6.5/10 Master target 4:00 Expert target 12:00

Puzzle 57: Ridiculous Changes
Operation Fillomino

EDIT: VERSION 5 fajshnkkbkxmidcvger I hope it’s the last update. I’m pretty sure it has a unique solution, but my intended solution requires a really large-scale (as in the whole thing) deduction as the first step. And hence, the expert time is doubled. Whee.

Erm. So I lied and posted a new puzzle before April. This was made while I was doing chemistry finals (after completing it).

Yes, I believe that 6.5/10 is accurate for a 7×7 grid, but I didn’t give this to my testsolvers so I don’t know what the others think. I’m giving this now, and I’ll edit the difficulty/time later after getting responses.

If you find the rules hard to understand, I suppose I should post an example…

Also, did you notice Puzzle 28 and FFF 25 are redone? (The originals were broken and I gave up finding a way to fix them.)

Puzzle 4: Take One

Surveyors Heyawake (v0.1) Follow regular Heyawake rules: Follow dynasty rules. Additionally, no connected white cells in the same row/column may span over one bold border.

There are numbers in the grid. For each “region” (bold-bordered area), exactly one of the numbers act as a Heyawake clue: the number is equal to the number of black squares in the region. All other numbers are Minesweeper clues: each number is equal to the number of black squares on the number or adjacent to the number.

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

Puzzle 4: Take One
Surveyors Heyawake

Original text
Yeah bad title maybe. But I think this one has some pretty tricks waiting (besides the tricks of Heyawake)… I’m trying to get a few basic tricks I figured out here. However, this would be rated somewhere like medium, or 4 out of 10. Whoa.

And yes, I miscounted; I didn’t see Puzzle 3 in my book so I reported that I had only two puzzles ready, while I have three. 😛

Additional text on 27 September 2013
Take One of Surveyors Heyawake. When the rules are still rather crude. (The finalized version is actually much more complex x3 )