peek at solution solve puzzle
quality: difficulty: solvability: moderate lookahead?
Puzzle Description:
A Storm Trooper
#1: Norma Dee (norm0908) on Nov 19, 2016
Good one. I ended up guessing a little.#2: Donna McFarland (jade8114) on Nov 19, 2016
Very good likeness. Well done.#3: Kurt Kowalczyk (bahabro) on Nov 19, 2016
all right pic, but you really ought a avoid symmetrical puzzles.#4: Michael A Rodgers (marodgers) on Nov 26, 2016 [HINT]
which btw, is the only way this solves. if one assumes symmetry, easy peasy. otherwise, it's massive guessing...
you've got great potential, miss Darah. (cons criticism--you just threw this up there with a quickness, you know you can do better. take your time, develop :) )
One hairy spot but the obvious symmetry made it relatively easy to solve.#5: Wombat (wombatilim) on Mar 31, 2017 [HINT]
I'm marking this as deep lookahead. I could use moderate in several places, but at the end you need to either use symmetry (which we generally disregard as a valid solving method) or need to look ahead 3-4 steps to solve.#6: Andrew Schultz (blurglecruncheon) on Dec 26, 2021 [HINT]
I agree with Wombat. I looked around quite a bit. First, it seems pretty clear that it's at least moderate lookahead due to the 16 and 12 and smile logic.
And I agree symmetry makes things pretty easy, but straight-up logic works as follows (not all details are here, and pretty much all of these steps can be mirrored.)
Rows 7/8 use smile logic.
The 4 in column 5 has to be rows 15-21.
The 7 on the right cannot start at C15, 16 or 17, or C17R11 would be black and C18R11 would be white, making the left 6 impossible. That means C22-24R11 most be filled in. Symmetry fills in most of rows 11-12.
But I'm stuck there. Filling in R15C4 as black gets a contradiction but it's 3-4 steps down the road. Then you can fill in the top 16 rows.
I then placed the 6 in row 29. That got some more. I got a dot at R24C13. I also realized the box at C3-5R19-20 could not have C5R20 filled in and then C5R19 could not be either. That left colum 5's 1 at R23 or R24, but if it were at R23 you get a contradiction with the 3 below.
The 4 in R16 then can be cut down with trial and error to show it must indeed be in the center.
While it's possible/likely this isn't the most elegant solution, there are too many times I had to look deep for me to mark this moderate lookahead.
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