jdyer (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jdyer) wrote,@ 2004-07-24 23:59:00 |
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PQRST #10 puzzle competition
This is referring to the puzzle competition here:
http://www.otuzoyun.com/pqrst/
The file for #10 is downloadable, so you can see what I'm talking about. Mild spoilers ahoy, so try solving them on your own first if you are intending. This may all appear a little obscure to people not used to these sort of puzzles; I'm happy to clarify any questions someone might have.
1: The curious thing here is how obvious the puzzle maker intentions are when the card for E looks like the card for W and M. I didn't really solve this puzzle in the logical sense, I just took for a premise that property would be used and everything fell out.
2: This puzzle isn't original, actually, although I'm sure the author didn't realize that. The person who did the rebuses for Concentration wrote an identical puzzle which appeared in Games Magazine a few years back. I imagine the mental process was this: hey, the Olympics are coming up, those Olympic rings look puzzly. Let's try tossing numbers around and see what happens. (Incidentally, the very first World Puzzle Championship also had an Olympic Ring puzzle, although it was structured differently.)
3: This one had me in a panic briefly with the 'I have no idea how to solve this' feeling. Then I just guessed if I started the 24th number with 6 and only decreased the number when I had to things might fall into place, and they did. I'm wondering if this is a necessary condition in a unique puzzle, or if it's possible to trip this method up somehow.
4: This puzzle was extremely nice in that many omino puzzles can't be solved through a sane method of deduction, but this one lent itself to a very methodical and pleasing technique.
5: Logically pleasing, although I'm not sure if this puzzle has repeatability -- that is, it would be interesting rendered multiple times. Also, rather than a perfect blend of Skyscraper and Easy As technique, I switched between them when one led me to a dead end; I wonder if there is some synthesized logic step that combines both to make the solving go faster.
6: Argh. Just bad. The puzzle had confusing directions (it needed a lot of errata to clarify) and even once understood it isn't that pleasing. Determining what can be seen and what cannot is the main (tedious part) and there were only a few (simple) steps of actual logic involved.
7: The hardest for me to solve, partly because a certain erratum hadn't been posted yet (no digits can overlap -- just affects the 0, but even that would've helped). I ended up using (more or less) brute force -- I guessed the 8 would be horizontal (via intuition of the structure -- or perhaps I just got lucky) and tried every possible position until it came through.
8: I'm not fond of all counting problems (how many squares in such and such a dull figure) but this one was very clever and had its main trickiness in visualization. Also, checking all the possibilities wasn't prohibitive, and it didn't leave one with the usual sense of 'do I have the right answer? I should check over 5 more times' that I often get from these sorts of things.
9: I *think* I'm optimal here, but we'll see. I was pleased with this puzzle in that rational thought played as much a part as random experimentation. (Edit: Nope. One square off. Clever, too.)
10: (Edit: Ok, I *completely* misread the problem. One of these days, I will accomplish something, and I will not screw up in the process. Grr. [Specifically, one is supposed to cover the grid with the minimum number of squares possible, but you want that number to be *high*, not *low*. I suppose it was relatively clear in the directions but even going back I had to read it three times over to see what I did wrong -- somehow there had to be a better way of phrasing things.])
Anyhow, I pretty much lost all the optimization points, dropping me to 725. At least I got all the normal problems.
This is referring to the puzzle competition here:
http://www.otuzoyun.com/pqrst/
The file for #10 is downloadable, so you can see what I'm talking about. Mild spoilers ahoy, so try solving them on your own first if you are intending. This may all appear a little obscure to people not used to these sort of puzzles; I'm happy to clarify any questions someone might have.
1: The curious thing here is how obvious the puzzle maker intentions are when the card for E looks like the card for W and M. I didn't really solve this puzzle in the logical sense, I just took for a premise that property would be used and everything fell out.
2: This puzzle isn't original, actually, although I'm sure the author didn't realize that. The person who did the rebuses for Concentration wrote an identical puzzle which appeared in Games Magazine a few years back. I imagine the mental process was this: hey, the Olympics are coming up, those Olympic rings look puzzly. Let's try tossing numbers around and see what happens. (Incidentally, the very first World Puzzle Championship also had an Olympic Ring puzzle, although it was structured differently.)
3: This one had me in a panic briefly with the 'I have no idea how to solve this' feeling. Then I just guessed if I started the 24th number with 6 and only decreased the number when I had to things might fall into place, and they did. I'm wondering if this is a necessary condition in a unique puzzle, or if it's possible to trip this method up somehow.
4: This puzzle was extremely nice in that many omino puzzles can't be solved through a sane method of deduction, but this one lent itself to a very methodical and pleasing technique.
5: Logically pleasing, although I'm not sure if this puzzle has repeatability -- that is, it would be interesting rendered multiple times. Also, rather than a perfect blend of Skyscraper and Easy As technique, I switched between them when one led me to a dead end; I wonder if there is some synthesized logic step that combines both to make the solving go faster.
6: Argh. Just bad. The puzzle had confusing directions (it needed a lot of errata to clarify) and even once understood it isn't that pleasing. Determining what can be seen and what cannot is the main (tedious part) and there were only a few (simple) steps of actual logic involved.
7: The hardest for me to solve, partly because a certain erratum hadn't been posted yet (no digits can overlap -- just affects the 0, but even that would've helped). I ended up using (more or less) brute force -- I guessed the 8 would be horizontal (via intuition of the structure -- or perhaps I just got lucky) and tried every possible position until it came through.
8: I'm not fond of all counting problems (how many squares in such and such a dull figure) but this one was very clever and had its main trickiness in visualization. Also, checking all the possibilities wasn't prohibitive, and it didn't leave one with the usual sense of 'do I have the right answer? I should check over 5 more times' that I often get from these sorts of things.
9: I *think* I'm optimal here, but we'll see. I was pleased with this puzzle in that rational thought played as much a part as random experimentation. (Edit: Nope. One square off. Clever, too.)
10: (Edit: Ok, I *completely* misread the problem. One of these days, I will accomplish something, and I will not screw up in the process. Grr. [Specifically, one is supposed to cover the grid with the minimum number of squares possible, but you want that number to be *high*, not *low*. I suppose it was relatively clear in the directions but even going back I had to read it three times over to see what I did wrong -- somehow there had to be a better way of phrasing things.])
Anyhow, I pretty much lost all the optimization points, dropping me to 725. At least I got all the normal problems.
