| User puzzle #411 |
astrokath
Kwon-Tom Obsessive
Puzzles: 3258
Best Total: 13m 42s | Posted - 2009.12.02 15:47:56
Thanks Naivoj for a VERY challenging puzzle! It only took an elapsed time of over 22d19h to reach the end...
Excuse me while I scrape what's left of my brain off the floor. |
Naivoj
Kwon-Tom Addict
Puzzles: 314
Best Total: 33m 50s | Posted - 2009.12.07 08:25:23
I was kind of out of loop the loop puzzles, when about a month ago I was stuck at the office on a Saturday with networking problems. I couldn’t do my work, neither access internet. I needed something to kill time and I remembered that I have our puzzle solver/generator program on my C drive, so I started playing with it resulting in user puzzles 410 and 411. Btw, my elapsed time for 411 is 17d 23h.
I think that the key to make a puzzle really harder is to minimize the highlander pattern and highlander deduction opportunities, (mainly by avoiding contiguous white space area). A counter example is v_e_e_n_c_a puzzle #415 which is not hard if you only use one highlander pattern: after applying the basic highlander 2 pattern in the bottom left corner the puzzle solves itself without any exploration or any other highlander deduction. |
astrokath
Kwon-Tom Obsessive
Puzzles: 3258
Best Total: 13m 42s | Posted - 2009.12.07 10:51:21
Yes, I *really* felt the pain of the lack of easy highlanders in your puzzle. I spent a lot of time working on chains of chevrons along diagonal 2's, frequently filling half the board or more before I could definitively rule out a single line or cross. Hard fought, those battles for the first handful of non-obvious marks!
There were a couple of highlanders that helped me rule out false approaches in some spots (I particularly remember a spot in the middle of the bottom row, where I had two horizontal lines spanning a 2 in what I seem to recall was the third row up - that gave me two routes around the 1's and 2's beneath it, and won me either an x or a line somewhere way off on the far side of the baord...) - I dread to think how nasty it'd have been if it was completely highlander-free like some of your other recent nasties!
I must give #410 a try next...
Last edited by astrokath - 2009.12.07 10:51:58 |
Nis
Kwon-Tom Obsessive
Puzzles: 2208
Best Total: 22m 1s | Posted - 2009.12.19 19:47:16
I made it. Woohoo.
I did a restart at one point - so my time of 5d 22h is not the entire time I spent on it.
I did end up using quite a few larger highlanders - especially in the bottom left corner. |
