Flat Cosmos (Chaos Construction)
(Published on 13. August 2024, 23:53 by sfushidahardy)
This puzzle should be considered a counterpart to Holographic Principle, which was my first (9x9) chaos construction. Holographic Principle was all about "forcing region geometry via constraints on the grid boundary", but in this puzzle there are no boundaries and everything happens on a toroidal grid. I hope you enjoy it!
- Chaos Construction: divide the grid into regions, each consisting of orthogonally connected cells, and fill each row, column, and region with the digits 1 to 9 once each.
- Sightline arrows: the digit in a cell with arrows is the total number of cells belonging to the same region in all indicated directions (including itself). Entering different regions obstructs this vision.
- Toroidal grid: for the purposes of chaos construction regions and sightline arrows, consider rows 1/9 and columns 1/9 orthogonally adjacent to one another.
Here's an example grid to demonstrate a partial solution to a 6x6 version of the ruleset:
Solution code: The digits in row 2, with a forward-slash at region-boundaries. For example, 123/45/6789.
Comments
on 11. October 2024, 09:55 by 3good5you
Massive difficulty spike for my inexperienced eyes at the irregular but really fun all the way through!
on 2. October 2024, 23:05 by Christounet
That was really good ! Toroïdal grid works perfectly. Thanks :)
on 2. September 2024, 16:55 by SudokuHero
My favorite CC so far. I love toroidal geometry.
on 30. August 2024, 14:20 by jacques_
Really hard from beginning to end, took me and my friend nearly 2 hours to complete together! Every obstacle felt fair and every deduction felt earned though, loved it
on 24. August 2024, 23:29 by madhupt
Chaos construction is my favourite variant and this puzzle is so fantastic! The logic is so intricate and the underlying irregular sudoku was also very hard for me. Thanks for sharing this.
on 23. August 2024, 22:02 by DubiousMobius
This was a dazzling solve from start to finish! Thanks so much for setting!
on 21. August 2024, 20:13 by cam
I was exploring this sort of periodic boundary conditions constraint back when I was writing a paper about sphere packings a few years back. I know others have done so as well. They were always...bad. The constraint never led to interesting logic and was always just a weird annoyance. I could never quite come up with any logic that was truly interesting with it. This puzzle though was incredible. The boundary conditions are doing a lot for this puzzle but it's never challenging in that same annoying way mine were. This really scratched an itch for me and I appreciate you setting it. I know from experience it probably wasn't easy. I'm a sucker for a chaos construction and this was even better than your previous one. Cheers :)
on 17. August 2024, 21:57 by halakani
Gorgeous puzzle, 10/10.
on 14. August 2024, 15:23 by marcmees
very very nice. thanks.
on 14. August 2024, 09:08 by wisty
wtf that was awesome! how do you even set this?! pretty unforgiving break-in, lots of amazing and fun steps after. definitely a 5 star difficulty imo. quite a bit of interactions between region logic and intricate sudoku logic. loved it! thank you for sharing
on 14. August 2024, 05:57 by someguy209
I was surprised that having a wrap-around grip could have such a great solve path with a chaos construction, yet I was pleasantly surprised!
on 14. August 2024, 01:40 by MaizeGator
Another awesome region-building exercise!
on 14. August 2024, 00:00 by sfushidahardy
Improved example grid.
