croco-puzzle

[berni]

Anouncement: Tomorrow the "Easter Calender" will start: Like a normal advent calender, every day a new puzzle will pop up (actually three of them, one easy, one medium and one hard) until 24th of April, which is Easter Sunday this year, ending in a little surprise.

[dickoon]

Anouncement: Tomorrow the "Easter Calender" will start: Like a normal advent calender, every day a new puzzle will pop up (actually three of them, one easy, one medium and one hard) until 24th of April, which is Easter Sunday this year, ending in a little surprise.

Hooray! Looking forward to it.

I'm pretty sure that I found the logical path through the puzzle we're talking about, but by a route of about two minutes' logical deductions, a conclusion that there were no more to be had, half an hour of bifurcation that usually didn't get too far, starting again from scratch and then using the lessons I had sort of learnt from the bifurcation, another seven minutes or so to get the rest out. Oh, and not being able to tell a 6 from a 7 right at the end.

Good puzzle, but I don't recommend my route.

[detuned]

Note to self. Doing a sudoku twice is slower than doing it once. About twice as slow

With the Gebietssummen, I did find a logical route through in ~10 minutes, which is broadly the same as the one Alan will post up. My initial time of 7 or 8ish was spent mostly looking for a logical break-in (it is indeed there, and it is pretty sly), failing and getting a lucky guess. It's sort of a shame that such a puzzle is done against the clock. I have no problems with obscenely hard sudoku, and trying to find any sort of logic to get you through, but obviously if the clock is ticking and it's quicker to guess, well, I wonder what everyone will end up doing

[PuzzleScot]

Doing a sudoku twice is slower than doing it once.

Yes, but you'd need to do it 4 times to be slower than me!

Anyway, as promised, that walk-through, since a couple of people requested it...


First, givens: G1=7; C5=4; G5=1; G7=3.
Summing Row 1: A1/F1 = 1/2
summing Row 3: G3=4.
BL: A7=4; C7=7; A5/A6 = 5/6.
Summing first 3 columns -> C2/C4 = 1/2.
C1= 5/6. B1 = 3/4.
Consider B6/C6 and Row 6:
- cannot be 1/7, as both are in C col already.
- If =2/6, D6/E6 = 1/4, F6/G6 = 3/7. (No! Col G conflict)
So B6/C6 = 3/5; D6/E6 = 1/4; F6=7; G6 = 2; A6=6; A5=5.
Note G2 & G4 = 5/6. F4 = 3/4. F2 = 3/4/5.
Row 2's 7 must be D2/E2. Other value in D2/E2 = 4/5.
Therefore, the 6 in Row 2 must be at G2=6.
So, G4=5; F4=4; F1=2; F2=3; A1=1.
Col F: F5=6; F3/F7=1/5.
E4/E5 sum = 8. E4 = 1/6; E5 = 2/7...
If C4 = 1; D4/D5 cannot be filled, so C4=2; C2=1.
D2/E2 now 5/7. A2=2; B2=4; B1=3; C1=6; B6=5; C6=3; C3=5; F3=1; F7=5.
A3 cannot be 3, so A3=7; A4=3; B3=2; B4=1; B5=7.

The rest is fairly straightforward from here, but for completeness:
E5=2; E4=6; D4=7; D5=3; E2=7; D2=5; E1=5; D1=4; E6=4; D6=1;
E7=1; D7=2; D3=6; E3=3 and done.

[detuned]

^ didn't mean it quite like that Alan It's just with jaku out of the running, I'd have had a decent chance of hitting near a top score (I redid it just now in 1.20), with "only" Thomas and Hideaki still left with a plausible chance of posting a ridiculous time.

Anyway it would have been nice with the relatively bad week I've been having on croco. My upward green arrow has suddenly slowed down to diagonally up!

[drsteve]

Rubbish time on the sudoku, not helped by trying to restart and hitting Testen instead of clear so a 5 minute penalty. Hurrah!

[berni]

Rubbish time on the sudoku, not helped by trying to restart and hitting Testen instead of clear so a 5 minute penalty. Hurrah!

Maybe you'd like to know that F3 also does "undo"?

[drsteve]

Rubbish time on the sudoku, not helped by trying to restart and hitting Testen instead of clear so a 5 minute penalty. Hurrah!

Maybe you'd like to know that F3 also does "undo"?

I did not know that. That's really helpful, thanks.

[dickoon]

Congratulations to puzzlemad for joining the land of the ranked; yay, Liane!

[PuzzleScot]

Berni kindly sent me a list of all the croco-puzzle instructions in German, in one file!
I hope it's OK by him, but I've posted that in a new thread, inviting translations to English.
Once done, Berni can take all the instructions and incorporate into croco-puzzle somewhere (or simply refer here) for the benefit of non-German speakers.

So, if you have a spare 20 minutes, please choose a puzzle to translate, and contribute to the project, for everyone's benefit.

[david mcneill]

I had a strange experience on Crocopuzzle tonight. After solving the Hashi, my solving time was flashed up and I immediately navigated to the High Score Table. My name didn't appear. I reloaded the table several times but still my name was missing. I navigated back to the puzzle and had to solve it from scratch. So my final solving time was more than twice my original time. Any explanation?

Thank you,

David McNeill.

[ronaldx]

If the solving time is still in red writing, it hasn't yet been passed to the server - if you leave the applet before the writing turns white, your time won't be recorded. Know from experience

[david mcneill]

Thanks Ronald. I'll know the next time.

David.

[drsteve]

Out of curiousity - anyone ever done any worse than my Hashi score today?

[PuzzleScot]

Easy. 31/3/11 - Gebietssummen: 57:12 No Fehlversuch. That trumps your 54:27 8 Fehlversuch.

[nickdeller]

Seems like the Hashi was out to get nearly everyone today in various ways - my PC decided to turn into unresponsive treacle, probably due to a background app playing silly beggars. Astonished that it looks like I'll still come out ahead on the day.

David - you're quite lucky in a way. The day I discovered you need to make sure your time turns red, it was on a puzzle that took well over an hour to solve...!

[drsteve]

Easy. 31/3/11 - Gebietssummen: 57:12 No Fehlversuch. That trumps your 54:27 8 Fehlversuch.

Obviously I've still got some way to go then...

[PuzzleScot]

Obviously I've still got some way to go then...

One of us has!

[drsteve]

Obviously I've still got some way to go then...

One of us has!

You got a better aggregate score than me today, Alan. Although I'm pretty pleased with a positive overall score with that debacle.

[drsteve]

Is it just me, or was the Schwer Heyawake in the Easter Calendar an absolute pig of a puzzle today?

[sknight]

Is it just me, or was the Schwer Heyawake in the Easter Calendar an absolute pig of a puzzle today?

Sort of an interesting pig, but a pig nonetheless. There was so little given information it almost felt more like I was trying to design a puzzle with that given layout than "solve" one. Basically just bifurcated it like a boss. I did think the way you ended up with a lot of little 2x2 either/or diagonals to sort out was cool.

[detuned]

yeah definitely a bifurcation puzzle, but you could be at least a little clever with regards to where you started - figuring out which pairs of 1-cell wide boxes could actually be treated as an imaginary amalgamated numbered box

[detuned]

I had a strange experience on Crocopuzzle tonight. After solving the Hashi, my solving time was flashed up and I immediately navigated to the High Score Table. My name didn't appear. I reloaded the table several times but still my name was missing. I navigated back to the puzzle and had to solve it from scratch. So my final solving time was more than twice my original time. Any explanation?

Thank you,

David McNeill.

I just had this with the heyawake, thought I had a time of 28s, checked the highscore page to see where that put me, and saw it was nowhere. I must have gone back and solved it even more quickly to rescue it at 1.14. D'oh.

[detuned]

Ok now that's just weird...I thought I had it again with the U-bahn (adding another 2 minutes to my solve) but my original time of 4.16 is there

[drsteve]

I take back everything I said about the Schwer Heyawake being a nasty puzzle. May I introduce you to today's Schwer Hitori? Nastier than an extremely nasty thing indeed...