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#1: Jan Wolter (jan) on Jun 22, 2005

I really expected that my first version of this picture would be unsolvable. There is just so much white space and thin lines. But it turned out to be solvable, just barely.

Nice! A pretty hard one.

Nice image. I struggled with this one--was surprised that it was only rated a 3 in difficulty when I worked it.

Difficulty ratings can be a bit weird. On this particular puzzle, the ratings that had been entered before you rated it were: 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4. That averages to 3.125 which rounds off to 3.

Now the person who entered the "1" rating seems to be a bit off in left field. But that can happen. Some puzzles are difficult because there is one particular thing you have to spot to make it work. Some people might hit that early without even noticing that it was anything unusual, and have the whole puzzle fall into place easily. Others might miss it and have to do lots of hard scratching to find the solution. Some people may actually make a mistake, marking a cell that they can't actually justify, but if they just happen to mark that cell correctly, it could make the solution of the whole puzzle become easy. Some people typically do a lot of guessing, so for them, puzzles where they can recognize the image early and guess what cells need to be painted, are the ones that are easy.

I'd like to modify the rating algorithm to throw out maybe the highest and lowest rating before averaging the rest. That would also allow some puzzles to be ones and fives, which hardly ever happens with the current system. But many puzzles are rated by very few people, and I don't really know what the best algorithm would be.

Actually, the quality ratings are much more inconsistant than the difficulty ratings, I guess because they are even more subjective.

Cute picture!

Wow. I made a guess... I called myself working by process of elimination, but the guess I meant to eliminate turned out to be the right one... I reckon that has to happen eventually, like stuff always being in the last place you look for it?

But really, there's a spot there where I just couldn't see What to do... hints out there?

I did this one ages ago..forgot that it was a little tough

thank you again..I enjoyed it very much!

Excellent puzzle all round :)

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Very nice puzzle! I like the image and its energy. Maybe I just got lucky, but I found it reasonably difficult and not really hard. I think 3 is the correct difficult grading.

Loved it!

Once again, I loved this. Every time I go through all the puzzles again, I anxiously await getting to this puzzle.

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Excellent. Fun to solve.

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Really nice, happy image! Some trickiness solving, but I'm one of those people who resorts to guessing, no patience for hunting to find one missing pixel in hundreds. You can throw out my ratings if you want. 😊

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