Puzzle Description:

Map of the Mediterranean Sea. The borders between countries kind of reflect the time between 1945 and 1992.

#1: Jane Doe (telly) on Oct 23, 2008

I may have guessed on the bottom left corner, but did edge logic and kept going until it turned out solved, so...I don't know that it required guessing.

Color logic got me all the blue and the black in the top section of the puzzle, but left two regions in the bottom where the black wasn't obvious. Using edge logic on the black "4" in column 15 gave me most of the cells in that are, but left two very annoying empty cells there. Without those, I couldn't find out any simple logic to figure out the black in the lower left. Every proof by contradiction argument I could come up with was rather on the long side.

Someone had suggested that there should be some kind of "diagonal logic" for cases like this, but I've never really been able to formalize that enough so it felt more like logic than informed guessing.

So I'm calling this "requires guessing" unless someone smarter than me can show me otherwise.

By the way, I like the image. Even if you can't solve it by logic, you could probably solve it by profound knowledge of world geography, and shouldn't that be at least as good?

I'm certainly not claiming to be smarter than Jan (!), but I don't think I guessed! Did the image change?

The image has not been changed. At least not by me. At least not after it was published.

I has not been changed by anyone else either. (I never edit anyone else's puzzles - though, oh, I am sorely tempted sometimes when changing just a couple pixels would make a puzzle much better.)

lol I can see how that would be a temptation

I don't think I guessed either.

I solved the lower left by looking at column 1. The 2 clue will not go in R17C1 as it would cause column 2 to be invalid. So R17C1 is a dot. The rest solves normally. So I would have to say no guessing for this one.

Found to be logically solvable by jan.

I think I'd have called this one "Almost a Roman Lake". One of the later Roman Emperors noticed that so much land had been conquered already, that a little bit more would allow Rome's territory to entirely surround the Mediterranean Sea. Things didn't go as planned because Rome fell and lost most of its territory before the conquest was complete. So it was *almost* a giant Roman lake.

What an amazing Pop!

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