Puzzle Description Suppressed:Click below to view spoilers

#1: Adam Nielson (monkeyboy) on Aug 25, 2010 [SPOILER]

Comment Suppressed:Click below to view spoilers

i gave up and had to peek at the picture
its very nice but way too much guessing

Found to have multiple solutions by midalia.

very nice picture, but hardly solvable.

Besides running this site, I also maintain a page that compares the performance of various programs for solving paint-by-number puzzles. (see http://webpbn.com/survey/).

That survey includes a short list of "sample puzzles" used to test solving programs on. I've recently added this puzzle to the list. I'm wondering if the author of this puzzle would be willing to give permission for this puzzle to be freely redistributed from sites other than webpbn.

The Nonogram solving problem has long been a standard test problem for designers of artificial intelligence systems, but that's been a bit hampered by the fact that the puzzles they usually test there solvers on are all dead easy. A practical solving program needs to be able to work on even very hard or impossible puzzles, because, after all, the whole point of running them on sites like webpbn is to test whether a puzzle is solvable while the puzzle is being developed. So if the solver only works on nice clean puzzles like the ones usually published in magazines, then it is pretty useless. So puzzles like this with multiple hard to find solutions are actually of considerable value to researchers.

The default policy on webpbn is that the author retains the copyright on any puzzle posted here, granting only the right for people to download the puzzle from webpbn.com for personal use, not the right for people to redistributed it. This is fine for the purposes of my survey, since anyone wanting to test their solver on the puzzle could download it from webpbn, but it would be nicer if the puzzles in the test set could be passed from researcher to researcher. That's what I'm asking permission for.

If you grant such permission, you would still have copyright on the design, you'd just be allowing freer use of it, kind of like an "open source" program.

Thanks.

Awesome image. Excellent. Unfortunately, it was too difficult for me to solve. I did finally get it by checking after many guesses. It would have been more satisfying if it could be made logically solveable. But outstanding image.

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