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#1: Jan Wolter (jan) on Sep 14, 2006

This is pretty darned good for a bad puzzle.

I say it's bad because it doesn't have a unique solution. But it comes remarkably close. All the red and blue is solvable by logic alone. All the black solves except for the bits in the lower corners. The green pretty much all needs to be guessed, though there aren't that many possibilities, and I was able to get it all on the first guess.

The image is pretty good though, and it's actually fairly challenging. If just a few bits are changed very slightly, I think it could be a super puzzle.

To fix the black, I'd paint the two bottom corner cells black, bottom left and bottom right. That'd fix them.

Fixing the green without making the puzzle TOO easy would be a bit trickier. The following might work (you'd have to test it): In row 5, turn cells 9 and 11 green. In row 6, turn cells 8 and 12 green. In the bottom row, turn the middle two cells green.

There are many other possibilities to fix this. It'd be worth experimenting with, but try to keep the changes small. This is so close to being a good puzzle that big changes are more likely to do harm than good.

Took me a couple of guesses to get the green, but not too bad. THanks for the puzzle!

I can't figure out the green to save my life. Been working on it for an hour - I think I broke my brain and am getting crazier by the second. MEHEHEHHEHEHEHEHEHEHEH

Reworked the puzzle and found out I had the black at the bottom going the wrong way. So in fact there are two sections of the puzzle that are really left up to luck - the black at the bottom and the green at the top. The green at the bottom is easily guessed. I don't think this puzzle is fixable without ruining the integrity of the design.

I think you should change this so it has a unique solution. It's very frustrating to get to the end and not be able to solve it, and I don't think it's worth my time to try to guess at your intent, especially when the design is so abstract.

I found it really frustrating to solve this and then be told my solution wasn't right.

I can't get it, I want to, but I just keep repeating what I tried and can't figure out which pattern I keep overlooking. I wish it would either be fixed to have one solution, or someone would put up a spoiler to give me some help so I could see if finished product.

Comment Suppressed:Click below to view hints and spoilers

I spent ages trying different options for the green. Comment 4 nudged me to look at the black again, and after trying the other option for that, it only took a few more tries to hit the right pattern for the green. Very, very frustrating, because there are too many possible solutions.

You know, I played around with the black and green squares until I got it right, but maybe it's just because I'm a cranky old lady, but it is very irritating to me to have to do that. It really does make these puzzles less interesting to solve, and I wish people would just take the time to "fix" their puzzles before they submit them. Oh, well.

I was at the homelinux site for years, and puzzles like this would not have made it point where people could solve it. I guess I really am missing that site. Mostly I really like it here though.

Mostly the puzzles with multiple solutions are flagged as such. I should add an option which enables people who don't want to see them to "disappear" them from their lists.

I just generated a listing of the highest-rated puzzles on the site, and found that two of the top six were flagged as having multiple solutions. So lots of people seem to find this a forgivable flaw. (Personally, I'd always knock a puzzle down at least one rating point for that, so I'd never put them on the top of my list.)

If you do make an official "Top N Puzzles" list, it should definitely exclude any that require guessing. I'm fine with having some that require guessing; it definitely encourages more puzzles to be created by more people if they're not limited by solving perfection, but everyone should strive to make completely logical puzzles, especially when given good suggestions in the discussions. Paint-by-Numbers that cannot be solved strictly by logic are just pictures, not puzzles.

Since this puzzle was posted, the puzzle editor has gotten much smarter about being able to warn designers when there are multiple solutions to their puzzles. It doesn't prevent people from posting such puzzles, but I've found that hardly anyone posts them any more. So I'm inclined to consider this a solved problem, though there are still many old multiple solution puzzles in the database.

I cannot figure this puzzle out. Can someone tell me how the green is supposed to look. I made zig-zag lines, but it still tells me I'm wrong! AAHHH

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