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#1: Steve (stevieb) on Jun 25, 2020 [SPOILER]

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I'm running out of logical steps pretty quickly on this puzzle. Does it require guessing?

Found to be solvable with moderate lookahead by valerie.

No Phillip, edge logic!

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Odd. I agree with Kathy.

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Brian is right about the edge logic. After that, it is entirely LL.

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I just used symmetry starting with the edge 7's. Then I cascaded my 2's and 3's. It was a quick solve after that.

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The tricky part is determining where to start zigging and zagging.

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Joe, you said everything I was thinking, but couldn't put into words. Thanks.

Just out of curiosity, who puts the question marks in to indicate if a puzzle has multiple solutions? Is that part of the program or does somebody have to do that manually? I really depend on those question marks, because I don't do the ones with multiple solutions. I don't consider them legitimate puzzles.

Belita, generally uniqueness is determined at the time of creation. There is a program that is very competent that determines the uniqueness and solvability (LLS, anyway), but it is given a one-second time limit to avoid tying up the server. 99.9%+ are determined in that time.
If the server cannot determine whether it is a unique solution, then the puzzle is generally a complete mess to begin with.

Here's a way to be certain: if the puzzle is new and there is a box underneath that asks you to rate the uniqueness, then it is probably a bad puzzle.
The reason I say "new puzzle" is because of the puzzles from the Missing Times. They lost their ratings, so the determination has to be set manually by one of the moderators. We're working our way through slowly as we have time (and ambition, in my case).

PS. If the Uniqueness box is shown, choosing a selection is voting for that answer. Only a moderator can definitively set an unknown puzzle to "unique". *However*, if *anyone* comes up with a correct solution that is not the same as the intended one, the server immediately marks the puzzle as multiple-solution and puts up a comment by the webPBN Robot that says that the puzzle was found to have multiple solutions by [username]

That's great. And hat's off to the moderators who do such a great job keeping the site working.

Thanks Brian!

And Belita, you have come a long way!

We've all come a long way. When you solve puzzles from long ago the comments will say the puzzle was really hard, when now it seems pretty easy.

I am stuck in the same place as Joe with the exact same understanding of what constitutes guessing. This is either deep lookahead or guessing.

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