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Comments on Puzzle #3469: the x mark
By disorn (cape)

peek at solution       solve puzzle
  quality:   difficulty:   solvability: some guessing  

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#1: Sylvain "WCPman" (qwerty) on Sep 8, 2008 [SPOILER]

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#2: Adam Nielson (monkeyboy) on Sep 8, 2008 [HINT] [SPOILER]
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#3: Jane Doe (telly) on Sep 8, 2008 [HINT]
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#4: Jan Wolter (jan) on Sep 8, 2008 [HINT]
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#5: Adam Nielson (monkeyboy) on Sep 8, 2008 [HINT]
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#6: Jan Wolter (jan) on Sep 8, 2008
Nope. That's guessing. If you are doing edge logic right, then you totally KNOW that each cell you mark is correct.

However, it is natural to guess that the corners are going to be black, and if you do that the rest solves logically.

This is kind of like the "diagonal logic" thing. I know there is a unique solution, and I know what it is just by looking at it, but I haven't been able to come up with a sound logical procedure that lets me "prove" that those corner cells need to be black.
#7: Adam Nielson (monkeyboy) on Sep 8, 2008
Yes, but in edge logic, don't you pick any edge row or column, and place it at either extreme of the edge/row, and start solving it until you get an error, thus proving that any number of spaces are to be given a small dot?
#8: Jane Doe (telly) on Sep 8, 2008
so true Jan. I just kept going and saying...maybe....maybe. So not true logic was being used.
#9: Jan Wolter (jan) on Sep 8, 2008
Sort of, but I only look about two step ahead. If I'm placing a block in column 1, then I look at what cells that would fill in in column 2, and see if that is consistent with the clues for column two. This is something that I can pretty easily do without marking anything on the screen.

The whole "logically solvable" thing is a bit of a fuzzy definition (as has been discussed many times here) but to me it basically means that I wouldn't run into trouble if I were doing the puzzle on paper in ink. Things like edge logic and smile logic are cases where you can figure things out with only a little looking ahead, no more than fits in my mental buffer, but I suppose people's mental buffer size varies. If people can play chess in their heads, I expect they can solve paint-by-number puzzles in their heads.
#10: Adam Nielson (monkeyboy) on Sep 8, 2008 [HINT]
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#11: Sarah Andrews (sarah) on Feb 17, 2011
Hopefully this X is on a treasure map and we need to get shovels to find the buried treasure chest.
#12: Byrdie (byrdie) on Aug 3, 2024 [HINT]
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