Puzzle 359: Heyawake

It's been a long time since I did Heyawake.  As with the recent Masyu, it's not entirely Nikoli smooth, and there are bits I'd even go so far as describing as fiddly, but hopefully it makes for a decent challenge at least.

As a bit of an aside, I came across semiexp.net recently, and lots of it basically seems like magic to me.  For example:

• A Numberlink Generator
• (Surprisingly good) Computer generated Slitherlink

There's also something called pzprRT, which seems like an extraordinary setting tool.  Basically, for a small number of types, including 4 of my favourites: Yajilin, Masyu, Slitherlink and indeed Heyawake, you are able to mark up your puzzle using the pzprjs project (i.e. as featured on puzz.link) and then you can press a button and it will give you the live deductions corresponding to the clues you've put in.

I am still generally avoiding marking up my puzzles using puzz.link, as the interaction between the puzzle player and the hidden database (which stores the metadata of logged in solvers) is still not entirely clear to me.  I think I saw that this metadata is indexed by hashed versions of the puzzle URLs rather than the URLs themselves - this would kind of be fine by me I think as it means the database would be genuinely only metadata, rather than actual puzzle data making up some kind of secret dystopian mega master puzzle database.  But in any case pzprRT generated me a puzz.link, so I think it means this puzzle is now on the database, hashed or otherwise, and now what’s done is done.

I suppose what it does mean for you, dearest reader, is that you can also play along online!  I may even start making a habit of it.  Enjoy!

    #359 Heyawake – rated 8/10 [Very Hard]

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-21.

Friday Puzzles #240

Last week's puzzle seems to have got lost in the Christmas Maelstrom.  Nothing too tricky this time round though.  Enjoy!

    #277 Heyawake – rated easy

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-13.

Friday Puzzles #221

Apparently I was too busy not getting a job in London last week to remember to post a puzzle.  Have no fear, I'll be back with a bang tomorrow!

This week, a quirky Heyawake puzzle, a type I think I haven't revisited for a while.  I was tempted to go wacky on this one to make my original design work, but I think a little perseverance and polish and general puzzling discipline is good for one's authoring abilities.  Under the old system this is certainly hard, but rules is rules and it's not too hard to see where to look to continue your solving path at the sticking points.  Enjoy!

    #258 Heyawake – rated medium

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-13.

Friday Puzzles #176

I'm massively hungover, and I should really be going through the WSC/WPC booklets.  I'm really looking forward to seeing lots of good friends in Croatia next week.  With any luck I'll put together some live blogging whilst I'm there too.  For now, here's a not hugely inspired heyawake puzzle.  Enjoy!

    #211 Heyawake – rated easy

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-12.

Friday Puzzles #174

A quirky heyawake puzzle this week, probably just about medium in difficulty level.  I don't have time to say too much more than that; enjoy!

    #209 Heyawake – rated medium

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-12.

Friday Puzzles #169

This week I have learned that drawing shapes in heyawake is somewhat easier than drawing shapes in nurikabe.  That 2 and 7 there on the left should probably be closer together, but given that it's now a quarter to three in the morning I do declare myself happy with this puzzle.  Enjoy!!!

    #202 Heyawake – rated hard

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-12.

Friday Puzzles #157

So this post completes the 3rd year that Friday Puzzles has run.  How time has flied, dearest reader.  But you know me, no great fanfare here, I'll just keep plodding on as best I can and hope that people enjoy the ride.  This week, heyawake.  First one of these for a while. and ought to be fairly plain sailing.  Enjoy!

    #189 Heyawake – rated easy

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-12.

Friday Puzzles #147

Three is the magic number, and although maybe this week's Heyawake puzzle might seem a little same-y to my dearest readers with a longer memory, I think finally perfecting the theme is worth the post.  Enjoy!

    #178 Heyawake – rated hard

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-12.

Friday Puzzles #135

Back to old times eh? I apologise firstly for the delay in getting a puzzle out in the first place, and secondly for then putting out something broken.

No such issues with this one. It’s moderately monstrous. I guess what with the small size and everything, some of the intended logic might get lost in small bifurcation chains, but I want you to know, dearest reader, there is definitely an intended solution path and I am really quite pleased with it.

Enjoy, finally!

    #166 Heyawake – rated hard
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #121

Again, I can only apologise for the lateness of this post. Rest assured I’ll be in the country both on Thursday evening, and on Friday, so the next post will be on time.

This Heyawake is the the culmination of a few ideas I incoherently put together at quarter to one this morning. With a larger size, I reckon this could be developed into a more “complete” puzzle, but hopefully there are a couple of interesting quirks with this one. Enjoy!

    #151 Heyawake – rated medium
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #110

So details of my LMI July Puzzle test, another Nikoli slection, will be released imminently.

Also of note to puzzle fans throughout the land is news of the official UK Puzzle Championship, following on from the Sudoku Championship I happened to win the other week. The drill is much the same, you need to be registered at the UKPA forums, and you should probably take a look at firstly the instruction booklet and the discussion thread if you intend on competing. As before you can participate during any 2 and a half hour window over the weekend.

This week’s puzzle is Heyawake. It’s largely easy, but with a couple of twists thrown in for good measure. Enjoy!

    #138 Heyawake – rated medium
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #96

This week’s puzzle will be slightly delayed due to a slight hitch in the uploading process…more soon…

UPDATE:

So back down to earth this week. I didn’t have access to my laptop earlier, but thankfully I was able to quickly cook up an inkscape template and save it directly to the right directory. Marvellous. Anyway, this puzzle isn’t so hard I don’t think, but you’ll want to watch your step. Did I already do a “4” themed Heyawake? If so never mind. Enjoy!

    #122 Heyawake – rated medium
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #85

Well, as we bring 2010 to end, dearest reader, I must confess that this post has been written in advance, as I am currently having almost literally a whale of a time in Berlin. I’m afraid that means that there isn’t going to be a puzzle here until sometime next week – I have had myself a nice and lazy and indulgent Christmas break at home with the family.

However I hope that everyone has enjoyed my offerings this year, be it my rather manic 7 puzzles in 7 days which heralded me branching out to writing a few new puzzle types; or perhaps my long Championship write-ups from Philadelphia in April and London in September; or the start of my “career” as a competition writer with both the (moderately disastrous) LMI Nikoli Selection and the UKPA Sudoku Championship (well done again Warren!); or perhaps one of the numerous twisted symmetry Masyu I always seem to resort to when I’ve forgotten to write a puzzle for a particular week.

Anyhow, I hope everyone has had a good 2010, and here’s to the promise of 2011 – not least the puzzle that’ll be edited in here later!

EDIT: Here as promised is the puzzle. I will probably be revising Heyawake fairly soon, in response to an email I had from Otto Janko before Christmas – but for now, here is a nice small puzzle which should prove a bit of a tough nut to crack. Enjoy!

    #111 Heyawake – rated hard
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #75

A.K.A. Tom Collyer finishes unfinished business

A.K.A. Tom Collyer keeps his promises (at least sometimes, at any rate haha…)

A.K.A. Who needs a list of pentominos by the side of a puzzle anyway?

So this is a tough cookie. But it’s worth it, I promise you. 75% solves beautifully well, and the last quarter is a bit of a head scratch. If it’s too much of a head scratch, you can probably trust my good nature and use a few hinted shortcuts to finish the puzzle. Enjoy!

    #092 Nurikabe – rated hard

P.S. A few weeks back I eulogised about how great my Marathon puzzles for the LMI test were. As it turned out, the test was somewhat of a disaster, with a high proportion of broken puzzles and plenty of egg on my face. That said, there were still some rather good puzzles and you can probably expect to see a couple of them reposted on my blog on weeks when I’ve not got a spare mo to do a semi-decent puzzle.

Anyhow, the Heyawake was actually broken – which made me die more than a little inside because if you skipped over the contradiction the mistake implied, it was in my opinion the best of the three puzzles. I did fix it, but it’s not the same :(.

    #093 Kakuro – rated hard

    #094 Masyu – rated hard

    #095 Heyawake – rated hard

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-10

Friday Puzzles #64

This week’s puzzle is partly inspired by something that my good friend Jason Z (Ziti) sent to me earlier this week. It is probably also the most difficult puzzle I’ve ever made – If I used more than three ratings to classify my creations, then there’d have to be at least one or two more above “hard” to accommodate this beast. As it is, this is only “hard”. Enjoy, and give yourself a pat on the back when you’re done!

Edit: It appears the Warwick servers are playing up, so this may add to the challenge of solving the puzzle; I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about that. On the other hand, it gives me a chance to plug Sudoku Xtra – whose 9th issue is now out. Contrary to the name, this magazine features a lot of puzzles which are decidedly not sudoku, and is well worth a look. This month’s edition includes the recent (not this week’s that is) Heyawake and A/S Heyawake puzzles that have featured on this blog, as well as contributions from David Millar (who has put together a sudoku competition this weekend) and puzzling friends mathgrant and MellowMelon.

    #078 Heyawake – rated hard

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-10

Friday Puzzles #59

So a week or two back I saw a wonderful twist on the rules of heyawake, courtesy of Grant Fikes. I’m sure the more adventurous browsers of this blog will have already come across his wonderful page, but for those who haven’t then give it a visit.

Anyhow, the twist is this: instead of numbers in the rooms indicating which squares should be shaded in, rooms are labelled with either S, A, or not at all. Rooms labelled S should have squares shaded in with 180 degree rotational symmetry (which includes no shading at all), whereas rooms labelled A definitely cannot have that 180 degree rotational symmetry. Rooms with no label can be shaded any which way you like, provided you don’t break the other heyawake rules, which if you’ve forgotten can be found on the very handy “how to play” section there on the right. Anyhow, Grant’s puzzle was fairly gentle, but here I’ve been a bit keener to explore some of the logic, and how it interplays with some standard heyawake tricks.

    #070 A/S Heyawake – rated hard

I should also mention that some puzzles from a while back have been featured in the 8th edition of Dr. Gareth Moore’s Sudoku Xtra magazine. This is quite a cool magazine, and whilst I should stress that I’m receiving no commission or anything, it is definitely worth a look for all you puzzle fans – it’s packed with a lot of nice puzzles. As well as those WSC5 style puzzles I did, it features the Sudoku Islands puzzle from last Friday. So what the heck…here are a couple more. These are definitely on the easy side of things, but I do have some trickier ones in reserve that are part of my ongoing sudoku project. Enjoy!

    #071 Sudoku Islands – rated easy

    #072 Sudoku Islands – rated easy

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-10

Friday Puzzles #47

Ooooh – a Sunday. Looking at the time, I think I’m currently drinking myself into oblivion. I’m hoping that this time I can keep myself away from the gin. Gin always gives you one hell of a hangover, and bearing in mind I’m due to be playing cricket later today that’s one thing I could be doing without.

But what better than a drunken puzzle to liven up any party!? Especially one as tricky as this Heyawake. Some careful thinking is required here to avoid tripping yourself up; indeed, that’s why I had to unfortunately break the symmetry of this puzzle to make sure everything was above board. Still, the solve itself was well worth tinkering with to get right, and so that’s why this one gets to be published. Enjoy!

    #057 Heyawake – rated hard

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-10

P.S. Incidentally, I thought the Hitori yesterday was harder than this puzzle – but a very helpful testing session with this puzzle has probably changed my mind. Thanks Agnieszka!

Friday Puzzles #21

So perhaps things have been getting a little too mathsy; and certainly I could do with a sudoku break. So, here are a couple of easy Heyawake puzzles, themed with a small number of numbered rooms. Obviously when you focus on just one of the rules of a puzzle, then you lose some of the richness and variety, and this is the case with these two puzzles. As such they are both pretty easy. Still, I hope they still prove to have at least some fun factor coming from their novelty value. 

    #025 Heyawake – rated easy

    #026 Heyawake – rated easy

I am wondering whether it is possible to do a Heyawake puzzle with no numbered rooms at all – at this stage I’m sort of conjecturing that with enough fiddling about with thin rooms in the corners it ought to be doable…whether that translates into any sort of a fun solve we shall have to see.

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009

I Will - a.k.a. Friday Puzzles #15

This week’s entry in my Friday Puzzles series gets its own proper Radiohead-song-title because I’ve managed to go off on one and explored a few deeper avenues than I would have normally done.

Last week’s introduction to the Heyawake puzzle I have decided was a bit hard as an introduction to the puzzle – although I’m now confident it wasn’t totally unfair having had this feedback from one of the best nikoli.com solvers out there:

"I liked it! The start was simple enough, and then you made some medium-level deductions to get some big sets of blocks, etc. I’d say the grand finale (I felt pretty sure there were two solutions or more…no, I was wrong) isn’t as bad as you claim. It probably shouldn’t be someone’s first Heyawake, but it’s not the pinnacle of difficulty. It’s a harder medium, how’s that for a/n non-/answer?"

On the other hand, I’ve been having a little think about the nature of difficulty and the nature elegance within a puzzle. I think it’s fair to say that by no means are the two are correlated – see this entry for two examples of sudoku too hard to be elegant – well elegant for the pen and pencil solver anyway. To labour the point a little bit more, here is an example of a puzzle which is INSANELY difficult. If you solve it, the only logical deduction is that you used a computer:

I found that puzzle after routing around a forum discussion of the hardest sudoku puzzles, it has been given the slightly affectionate nickname “Platinum Blonde”. These people have gone way beyond the solving capabilities of any human solver. So whilst I may have claimed previously that the 2009 Zilina world record puzzle was as hard as it gets and that it’d be the puzzle Beelzebub himself would set you to save your soul – actually the behemoths these people whip up for each other you are doing extremely well to solve even if you use lots of trial and error. I recommend not even starting to attempt.

Now, on the other hand, some easy puzzles can be extremely elegant. Not necessarily in the techniques required to solve them in isolation, but how the techniques come together to form a complete and satisfying solve. What this could mean for example, is a puzzle that has a definite starting point, which leads directly to another deduction and so on – inducing a “continuous flow” to the solving experience. It may be a repetition of a particular solving technique, or it may be a particular visual pattern that emerges as you solve the puzzle. I guess much like any art form, there isn’t really a satisfying way to define what makes a beautiful puzzle – but even a complete novice can spot it and enjoy it when they see it.

Anyhow, that’s an awful lot to aspire to. I’m not quite sure how much of that I’ve managed to achieve with this Heyawake (if any at all), but I’m running out of time to fiddle with it today…

    #020 Heyawake – rated easy

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009

Friday Puzzles #14

So this week’s (last week’s?) puzzle was slightly delayed as I was concentrating on the nikoli sudoku time trial. My laptop was to have other ideas: deciding to delete/corrupt/mutilate/whatever a crucial windows system folder – and so I had to rush to a computer room to take part. Being all of a fluster, and starting a full minute late I managed a meagre 6th. Having gone back later, I improved upon my time by nearly two minutes. C’est la vie.

The upshot of all that is that I wanted to write my own fairly challenging sudoku – but I find writing Sudoku puzzles (or at least good ones) to be a lot more challenging than other nikoli puzzle types. So, cutting my losses for now, I’ve instead tried my hand at Heyawake. You can find the rules to the puzzle here.

I probably ought to have introduced the puzzle to my blog with a nice gentle introduction – but instead I’ve gone with a sink-or-swim puzzle where you’ll have to do a bit of thinking about the rules and their implications.

    #019 Heyawake – rated medium

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009