Friday, 1 November 2013

Friday Puzzles #230

Chronological order is overrated.  For the week before last's puzzle, I thought I'd introduce all my dearest readers to the wonderful puzzle that is curve data.  I'll try and write up a rigorous version of the rules soon, however part of the beauty of this puzzle is just how intuitive it is, so I'm sure you'll all soon work out what is going on.

Re uniqueness, this seems to be a bit like numberlink for me, so perhaps bear with me on some future puzzles.  I'm pretty confident these are all good though!

The first puzzle is a somewhat narcissitic-yet-trivial example - although hopefully it clarifies exactly what you are supposed to do with loops.
    #268 Curve Data – rated (stupidly) easy
Maybe this next one isn't quite a medium, but seeing as it's the first one for the blog I'm going to relax my strict regime just this once!

EDIT: A previous version had rather more solutions than I thought.  This one I think is unique!
2nd EDIT: It isn't!  Back to the drawing board... :)
3rd EDIT: I got someone to test solve this first :p
    #269 Curve Data – rated medium
All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-13.

4 comments:

  1. For the second one, I found that the location of the middle line of the A is not unique...does that matter?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ah - I see the extra set of solutions I'd apparently managed to rule out. This one does have some uniqueness issues, I *think* a quick fix is to move D to R2C2 and E to R8C8. I'm too tired to check that properly now though...

      Delete
  2. The updated version seems to have a couple of solutions, too. (The bottom of the C can extend more or less, with the right leg of the A / entire B growing/shrinking vertically.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. For whatever reason, I had convinced myself that the B couldn't possibly span 4 rows - I see what you mean. It's a much more flexible shape than I'd given it credit for!

      Back to the drawing board...

      Delete

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