Puzzle Description:

Dream Theater's Octavarium Cover Art

#1: Web Paint-By-Number Robot (webpbn) on Apr 26, 2017

Found to be solvable with moderate lookahead by gator.

All of these steps may not be required.

After the initial line/color logic, all of the blue and green will be finished and the bottom half of the puzzle mostly filled in.

If we look at the 6 clue in column 32, it looks like it can go somewhere in rows 5-17. But look at how row 8 and column 33 would be affected by this. If the 6 clue existed at R8C32, then R8C33 would be a dot which pushes the 9 clue down. Then this forces the 7 clue in R15 to make R15C32 black which would make C32 invalid. So the 6 clue cannot occupy R8C32 (but we cannot make it a dot as the 3 clue could be there). Now we see the 6 clue is restricted to rows 9 - 17. This lets us make R12-14C32 black. LL

R13C23 is either part of the 5 clue or the third 1 clue. Let's consider it to be the 5 clue for now. If it extends to C24 or C25, this will make row 14 invalid. So R13C24-25 are dots as they would also be dots if R13C23 was the 1 clue. LL

In C1, if R19, R20, or R21 is black, this will extend the 6 in column 6 up to row 17 which would force R17C1 to be black. This would make C1 invalid. So R19-21C1 are dots. LL

If either R15C1 or R21C2 is black, this will cause R17 to be invalid, so these are dots.

The 6 in C3 has to either go in R1-8 or R13-21. Let's consider it going in R1-8 and how this affects C6. R6C3 would be black forcing R6C6 to be black also. R14C3 would be a dot forcing R14C6 to be black. This makes C6 invalid, so the 6 cannot go in R1-8. Mark these as dots, and R16-18C3 as black. LL (a lot of it).

If both R14-15C16 are dots, then this will cause a contradiction in R15 as R15C13 cannot be both a dot and black. So at least one of R14-15C16 must be black make R15C16 black in both cases. LL to finish.

I feel like this one is in the middle between moderate and deep lookahead as you had to keep a lot in your head for some parts. I'm going to mark it as moderate for now.

Nice puzzle.

Wow! Really interesting (and difficult) and rewarding solve. Fun aha! moment of recognition.

I had to look it up.
Dream Theater is the band.
Octavarium is the album.
Title is from the lyrics.

I'm not really into metal, but this stuff is great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUpYBAsS5Q0

I like the Newton's Cradle concept.

Goto next topic

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