Puzzle Description Suppressed:Click below to view spoilers

#1: Tom O'Connell (sensei69) on Nov 18, 2012

thx for entry, Kurt ... all good ideas :)

thanks, Tom

hahahaha....me and tom are the only 2 to solve as of yet....it says 0 raters....it was a 3, now a 2. sooooooo....2 people rated without even solving(a 3 and a 1). sorry, but that's kinda funny!

ok, now it changed to a 4....still 0 raters. means the last one was a 5, and they didn't solve either. hahahaha

sensei doesn't solve puzzles. He peeks and comments. All within a few seconds after a puzzle is posted.

Better buy more than one book and some munchies.

sometimes, yes.....but if he's judging a puzzle, he had better be solving. I would hope so, anyway....

yeah, munchies! you read my mind, Norma. making dip to go with my tostitos as we speak...

Yeah. He probably at least solves the WCP puzzles. Just finished my chips and dip.

Kurt, I would recommend you stop obsessing about those little details time and time again. People are going to rate whatever they want for any reason, regardless of whether or not they solved it, just looked at it, or neither of the above. There is nothing you or anyone else can do or say to change that. It is the way it is. The important thing is this: Jan makes sure everything works out appropriately in the end. Base your success or failure (of any puzzle you create) on people's comments, and let those speak for themselves. Enough honest raters will overcome the "problem-raters."

As for Tom solving the puzzles, though, don't get your hopes up. :-)

ah, just thought it was funny today. relax, not getting worked up over it.

yesterday, however.....lol. (a sour mood mixed with beer = wanting to refer to a jackass as a jackass. I know damn well that person isn't gonna read it anyway. just made me feel a lil better)

:)

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dang Norma ...you too???? :(

thanks, sgusa!

I almost lost the empty line...figured it was a good challenge with it anyway. glad you liked it

kurt ...i never rate a puzzle that i'm judging...soooo your accessment is flawed.

no no, Tom....re-read. I said you didn't rate it. I assumed you solved, and said that the first 3 raters hadn't solved. the only possible flaw with my "assessment" is assuming you solved(and I sincerely hope my assumption was correct).

let's enjoy our Sunday and not look for trouble where there is none. (that goes for everyone)

Thanks for your entry! Great solve! Nice advise!

Amen.

thanks Jota!

another fun fact: the word "amen" means "yes" or "so it shall be".....it was customary for rabbis to preach in pairs, so one could verify what the other said as truth. therefore, when JC preached alone, he started all his teachings with "Amen I say to you". he pretty much was trying to verify himself.

Another educational gem.

Jesus drove a Honda but didn't talk about it.

“For I did not speak of my own accord” -John 12:49

hahahaha....I'll have to remember that!

oh yeah? you know what 2 sports were played in the OT?

baseball....(in the big inning)
tennis......(Saul served in King someone another's court)

LOL
Are we talkin' about Billie Jean here?

Jesus Christ is my lord and savior.... do you have to make fun of him in this forum? :-(

seeing as I never made fun of him and merely stated a fact, I'd have to assume you're talking about the honda joke. which was very funny. relax. I doubt Christ himself would mind it. I've heard jokes such as that from both priests and nuns. as a matter of fact, the OT sport joke was told to me by a nun(and I butchered it). trust me Tom, I'm deeply religious. and I'm fairly certain Norma is as well

Well, I hardly got anywhere with this one. NOT lls. I did not rate quality, since I'm not going to look at the answer, but I rated it as very difficult.

sorry to disappoint....there's a lot to look at. but trust me, it is indeed LLS. Me, bug, and any number of others would surely be more than happy to give a hint, if only we knew where you got stuck. Bugaboo made a great point a while back....it'd be great if there were a way to save/post what you have already.....

If it's lls, why is there "No hint available" when i use the L key?

I finally found a spot to continue, but this was really tedious. And even with the description, I'm not sure about the resulting image. Sorry, Kurt, I'm not a fan of this puzzle.

idk about the L key, as I've never used it or known about it...

yes, it's a tough solve. a bad image, I agree. I'm not a fan of it either. some enjoy the challenge though, so it has some merit. without a description, I'd not even see all I described.....they all can't be winners, can they? lol I definitely do appreciate the comments though, even neg ones. makes me better, or at least more in tune with what people want....if nothing else, I do try to pls. thanks again

If you get stuck and can't see a place to dot or fill, hit the L key and usually a purple arrow appears on the right or bottom edge indicating a place where a dot or fill can logically be placed.

Sorry I got a little whiney. Guess I'm tired and a bit cross-eyed from spending too much time on webpbn today.

thanks! I never knew it before now....oughta come in handy!

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The L button is notorious for not showing a space that can be marked in a LLS puzzle.

And by space, I mean a white space.

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Purple logic only shows clues that can be definitely placed. So if a row has only 1s, and one of the pixels in that row is black, the L key will not point out that row. This is because the purple arrow has no idea *which* 1 that pixel is. Humans, however, can also figure out that that pixel *has to be a 1* since there are only 1 clues, and therefore needs a dot on each side.

There are other cases where the L key does not show straight-up line logic. I made a tutorial covering some of them (for a marz puzzle) here: https://www.deviantart.com/infrapinklizzard/art/Logic-17889-291320627

You deviant :)

I could make the "L" key (now AKA the "hint" button) smart enough to always find hints for all line solvable puzzles. Maybe I should.

What it does right now is a simple left-right overlap algorithm. It finds two possible solutions for each line - the one with all blocks pushed as far left as possible, and the one with all blocks pushed as far right as possible. It then compares the two solutions. Any cell that is covered by the same block in both solutions must be the color of the block. Any cell that falls in the same gap in both solutions must be white.

This is a relatively fast algorithm, but it finds only the cases where we mark a cell because we know which block or gap it is in. Sometimes you'll have a clue like "1 1 1" and there will be a single black square, so you know that the squares on either side must be white, without knowing which of the three "1" clues it actually is. The "helper" and he "hint" button will miss such cases.

To find all line-logic markable cells, I need to go through and examine each unknown cell, and try setting it every possible color, then checking both the row and column to see if they work. This is a lot more computation to do. I could reduce it a bit by first doing the left-right-overlap algorithm, and remembering for each cell whether if was set to the same color on both the left solve and the right solve. If it was set to different colors, then there is no point in doing further testing on that cell, since we already know it can be more than one color. If it was set to the same color on both tests, then we can skip testing that color on the second pass, but we need to test all other colors.

But even with that extra bookkeeping, this could make the hint function rather slow on big puzzles, because on a C-color NxM puzzle, instead of doing on the order of 2(N+M) line solves, we are doing on the order of C*N*M line solves, which is a much bigger number. The red-dot thing just has to do two line-solves (row and column) for each click you do, and even that can be slow on big puzzles.

So I'm not sure if I'll ever do this. I might go a different direction - storing hints in the database. A stored hint would consist of (1) a list of cells that must already be set, (2) a list of cells that can then be set, and (3) some text explaining it. So if the "hint" button couldn't find a hint by left-right overlap, then it would query the server with the current state of the puzzle, the server would match that against he hint list, and return a hint.

Some of these stored hints would be automatically generated by the checker program. It would easily produce all the hints needed to solve all line logic solvable puzzle. More advanced hints would be user submitted, just as they are now in the comments. After you have solved a puzzle, you would have the option of going into a hint submission mode. It would look through the stored history of the moves you made to solve the puzzle, and check each move to see if it was something that was already understood either via the left-right overlap or by a previously stored hint. If not, it was stop at that point and ask you to explain your move. You could say "edge logic on the 9 in row 15", it would store that and move on.

But then I'd need some mechanism to fix things when people enter bad hints, and the whole thing gets more complex.

So I still hope to make hinting better someday, but it's not simple.

thank you for sharing your thoughts, Jan

The whole programming thing is pretty impressive if you ask me! I can manage basic code (html), but scripting eludes me. Thanks for the explanation about the hint button, Jan. This is a tricky image, but I solved with LLS only and I'm not really very good at this stuff. Had to go line by line to hunt for a square I could mark more than once though.

Omg...this is wonderful! It was a tough solve for me (but I did it!)...I got to read all the banter. I got to listen to Jan again (simply the best...how I miss him!)...and I learned about the L key, which should be a great help in the future, since I've been solving everything without it so far...and that has been tedious in some of the puzzles. I don't expect very many will ever read this, but I am in a very happy place right now...except for...really feeling Jan's loss all over again...but for just a minute there, it felt as if he never left....

Ditto JoDeen on everything you said here...I solved this one yesterday, and found it to be very fun to solve.
I miss Jan very much...it's a good thing that we can revisit the older comments on this site and remember x

I'm listening, Jodeen. I'm glad you discovered the L key. I remember how difficult it was before I found it too. And, yeah, it is so nice to "hear" Jan's voice, still. There are so many conversations with him that got lost in the big crash, but at least we still have some of them.

I love our community. When you really stop to think about it...it's pretty miraculous. We all exist to each other only in the ether...and yet we have the ability to affect each other emotionally. We can make each other laugh...cry...even try on new ideas sometimes. That, to me, is mind boggling.

It's nice to share this with you, Marie-Louise and Teresa. Know that seeing your names (as well as the other regulars) when I log on, brings a smile to my face. I love your puzzles!

XOX

Jan used to be an enthusiastic player in the Ann Arbor public library's Summer Game -- an activity where there are a variety of ways that you can earn points. One way you can earn points is to rate the quality of the book reviews that other people have written (which is helpful to the library, because then they can use people's ratings of book reviews to show the best ones first). The library's game doesn't show you the rater's name when you review reviews, but sometimes I'll recognize that a review has to have been written by Jan, because he wrote beautiful book reviews and had his own thoughtful style. Then I'll go look up the book's listing in the library's catalog to see who actually wrote the review -- and it always does turn out to be Jan. His postings on his Facebook page are full of lots of interesting random Jan-ness too.

It's almost five years since he died, but still these time capsules of Jan-ness are tucked away all over the Internet. It makes me happy to run across them.

And I run across them surprisingly often, all considered.

I hardly ever cry, but I find myself tearing up reading your comments, JoDeen and Valerie. I remember checking out the library's Summer Games after Jan mentioned it in a conversation. I remember reading all Jan's essays on his site (which I believe there still is a link around this site somewhere for others who might be interested). Yes, he had a cool style of writing. You could tell that he put a lot of thought into his words, even in casual conversations here. He was such a dear, dear man. I miss hiim so much.

Valerie, I just want to give you a big hug. And thank you so much for keeping webpbn going. Because we not only enjoy the puzzles, we also enjoy rediscovering those time capsules of Jan-ness here. What a great legacy.

Aw. Hugs Teresa!!

Teresa -- The website you are thinking of with things that Jan wrote is at greatgreenroom.org . (It was broken for years, but last spring I fixed it.)

That's it! One of many legacies. Jan was a good person, and intelligent, and insightful, and took action to make this a better world. From what I have learned, you seem to be the same kind of person. I think perhaps Jan's (and your) greatest legacy is your precious family. With those genes, your children are the hope for the future in our somewhat fragile world. Hugs back, Valerie.

I've enjoyed reading (and rereading) Jan's writings at greatgreenroom.org . Jan's little "time capsules"...what an excellent description, Valerie! You always sound so positive when we talk about him...but if we miss him so much, I can only imagine how it is for you. Your children must figure a great deal in your ability to go through day-to-day without his physical presence. I hope you see him in some of their mannerisms, interests, senses of humor and levels of sensitivity and intelligence. Of course, they get all of that from you as well, but those little glimpses of him that come through the kids must be precious. I hope you are all doing well. Wishing you lots of smiles, today and always.

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