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#1: Levi Ross (rhodyboy888) on Dec 23, 2008

I guessed. Maybe it is solvable with logic. If so, I couldn't figure it out.

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Symmetry. Shay wins the best overall 10x10 puzzles. These are nice and fun.

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There's been a pretty involved discussion as to whether or not symetry can be a sort of logic. It's been supposed that a puzzle could be created where the clues portray symetry but the solution does not. Me - not quite good enough to make a decision either way.

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Found to be logically solvable by Gator.

One of the best situations of logic applied to a puzzle from you, Gator. I had to solve this puzzle again after seeing your comments.

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I agree that one of the charms of smaller puzzles is that greater levels of difficulty seem tolerable.

If you somehow knew for a fact that the puzzle had a unique solution, then using symmetry would be 100% logically sound. For most puzzles on this site, the pbnsolve program has already been run on them and has flagged them if they don't a unique solution, so I suppose you COULD say that you know it has a unique solution and run with the symmetry, but that's just saying that some computer program has already done a brute force trial and error analysis to determine if the puzzle is unique, so you can use symmetry to avoid having to do a brute force trial and error solution yourself. Seems kind of icky to me.

So our convention here is to treat "symmetry" as an inadmissible technique for logically solvable puzzles. An exception that I've allowed is if they author of the puzzle provides additional information about the how to solve it in the title, like [has unique solution] or [symmetrical]. Then, since this is given to the solver with the puzzle, the clue can be part of the puzzle.

I suppose you could design puzzles with other variant rules, like "at least one white between any two cells of different colors" and put those in the puzzle title too.

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