Puzzle Description:

#1: Raymond Fuller (rfuller4) on Dec 12, 2017

A little too much guessing for my taste, but a very nice picture!

That was some fiddly zigzag logic! Very pretty effect, though.

Red, black, and blue can be solved with line & color logic.

EL R20 will place 3 squares of the 4 clue. LL.

I'm able to spot a couple places of moderate lookahead here but they don't seem to get me very far:

R14: The 2 clue can't go in C1-2 because that will cause a contradiction in R13. Wherever it goes in the remaining 4 squares, the 2 clue in R13 is in C5-6.

C20: Regardless of where the remaining 2-clues are placed, C19 is green in R6-7 and 11. (There's a few squares of LL that can be done after this but not many.)

C1: Regardless of where the remaining 2-clues are placed, C2 is green in R7 and 12. (Few squares of LL.)

In R14 again I can see that the 2-clue can't be in R5-6 without causing a contradiction in R12, but I can't tell which of 4-5 or 6-7 it needs to be in, so that doesn't really help right now.

That's all I've got at the moment. I'll take another stab at this later.

I used a ton of picture logic (guessing).

Yeah, it was hard for me to solve too. I liked the image though so I decided to publish it. Sorry

Continuing from Wombat's hints:

Since either R5C18 or R5C20 has to be green, this let's us know that a 2 clue in either of those columns will start at those stops. Looking 2 moves ahead, this makes either R8C18 or R8C20 green. This makes R8C17 a dot in either case.

Following along in that same area, when we looked 2 moves ahead, either R7-8C18 were green and R7-8C20 were dots, or R7-8C18 were dots and R7-8C20 were green. In either case, R10C20 would always have to be green. LL.

No matter where the 2 clue in C12 goes, R7-8C11 will be dots.

Now look at C12 again and how this affects C10. If the 2 clue is placed in R3-4C12 then R4-5C10 will be green. If the 2 clue is place in R4-5C12 or R5-6C12, then C10 is invalid. If it goes in R6-7C12, then R4-5C10 will again have to be green. This lets us mark R4-5C10 as green. LL.

I think I'm going to have to stop there for now. I would say that we are already in Deep Lookahead territory as it is though.

I started from the sides, and began my diagonals where there was a 1 and a 2 clue, then checked to see if I had chosen correctly. Maybe it wasn't the most kosher of solving methods, but it got me started. :)

I really liked that it wasn't easy to solve. Don't be sorry about that please. I scan through the New listed looking for puzzles that are hard. Thank you for this one.

Pretty. Very difficult for me. Required guessing.

I won't claim to be the most expert solver, but I've never used save and revert so much for such a small image. I lost track of the number of times I said to myself "okay, I finally found where something DOES go, certainly it will flow from here" and was wrong. Progress was very incremental. Not a fun solve.

Goto next topic

You must register and log in to be able to participate in this discussion.