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#1: Sylvain "WCPman" (qwerty) on Apr 30, 2007

simple but kind of cute just like in a colouring book

I can't say puzzles without white do much for me.

Yeah. Nice picture though. I guess I cant complain about it being easy, becuase I made the easiest one on the site. ;-)

Yeah I know it's simple, but this one is for beginners who don't like to guess (like I used to be). Michael 3.1415926535... I'll check out your puzzles, 'cause yours (from what I am hearing) are easy. =)

If you want to find easy puzzles, go to the "puzzle home," and click TWICE on the "difficulty" heading in the list of puzzles. This will sort the puzzles you haven't solved yet by difficulty.

Ok, thanks.

Im a beginner on this site and frst ones i do are the easy ones so thank you to the people who make simple ones.

Cute :)

i quite like it =)

i like it. very cool

Cute but in no way a challange. Can it really be called a puzzle?

At least he warned us in the title that it would be a fill-in.

This puzzle is so extremely easy that it is likely to be boring to solve. You might want to add more white space.

I like it. I don't see why it isn't a puzzle just because it doesn't have white. White spaces would still be filled in with dots. If it didn't say fill-in, I wouldn't have figured it out immediately. I personally don't count all the numbers before starting the puzzle. For a larger one, I'd still have to "figure out" that it was fill-in and that sounds like a puzzle to me.

Hannah, the first time you click on a square, it should create a dot. If your first click creates a black square, that means there's NO WHITE, anywhere in the puzzle. so there's absolutely no logic involved in the puzzle. You're just filling in the values that you see in the clues.

Hannah - You're right, it is a nice image. To further explain what Kristen is saying: white spaces look empty to the puzzler and create variability. If you have a 20 space wide images and 20 spaces worth of color, there's no variance. You can just fill in the line from one side to the other with no solving. You'll notice there are no clues for "white" empty spaces. As soon as you introduce those then you need to solve where they fall around the other colors and it changes the possibility of where on a line the color clues fall. "Puzzles" need to be "solved" where as fill in is true paint by number. You're just matching the color to the indicate pixel.

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Great question, Hannah. The result is an image done much like a paint by number painting. And if that's all you wanted a coloring book would be just as good. In fact, I work for a paper company so I'd be very supportive of using coloring books. The added bonus here is that these are also logic puzzles.

I guess to understand it all you have to know a little bit about this website, who created it and why. I'll tell you what I know/remember and I'm sure others can correct me or fill in the bits I miss.

Jan was a math professor in Michigan and the beginnings of this site was a test he was doing to see if he could program a computer to mathematically solve these types of puzzles. When you're solving one that isn't just fill in, there's a lot of math involved. As he developed it further and it began to work better, he thought it would be a good idea to share it with others.

For me, I keep coming back because the challenge is a good way to keep my brain sharp. Some of the more difficult puzzles require me to involve cognitive thinking that I don't have to apply at other times. It's better than sitting idle watching videos or TV or playing games - not that playing games is bad either. They're good for developing or maintaining good motor skills and hand eye coordination.

Anyway, to simplify the answer to your question, most of the people who have negative comments for fill in puzzles are here for the challenge. To them (myself included) just coloring is somewhat boring and they want something that engages their brain.

Some of the one dot here or there puzzles that take a lot of time to solve can be tedious as well - I know, I created a couple of them and then had a tough time trying to solve them! But the challenge is where the excitement comes from. As you get better and better at solving these, you'll start to look at them more as puzzles as well, rather than just a place to make pretty pictures.

Hope that helps answer your question, Hannah. If not, ask again - be specific. I'm happy to try and help explain.

Hannah - Games Magazine has had logic puzzles called "Paint By Numbers" for many years, meant to be solved with a pencil and paper. A long time ago, Jan saw me enjoying solving those puzzles and he created this site as an online way for people to create that type of puzzles and share them with each other. He used the name "Paint By Numbers" for this type of logic puzzle because that's what they were already known as -- though this type of puzzle also has a lot of other names, such as Fill-A-Pix and Griddlers.

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