Cartography
(Eingestellt am 26. Januar 2025, 11:48 Uhr von pdyxs)
What if the fog clearance was the information...?
This is a strange and experimental puzzle, which really changes the way you solve a sudoku. In solving it, you have access to a lot of information, and most of the challenge is in figuring out how to manage that information.
It's also a bit of a shabby puzzle, but it's certainly interesting. Let me know what you think!
Rules
Sudoku: Fill the grid with the digits 1-9, so that each digit occurs exactly once in every row, every column and every 3x3 box.
Contours: Red lines are contours. Each line has a "high" side and a "low" side, to be determined by the solver. If two orthogonal digits are separated by a contour line, the digit on the "high" side must be higher.
Skyscraper Fog: The grid begins covered in fog. Each digit represents terrain of a height of that digit itself. Higher digits always block the line of sight of smaller digits.
When a digit is placed, fog will clear at that cell, and from any cells that can be seen from that cell in one of the four orthogonal directions. The value of the placed digit is irrelevant for determining what can be seen from that cell.
Given digit: A white digit is given, but will need to be entered.
Solving note: You'll need to delete digits you have solved in order to determine what other digits see. Use other markings (letters/colours with a white flash) to keep track of this.
More Experimental Fog puzzles:
Lösungscode: Code will be revealed in SudokuPad when the puzzle is completed
Kommentare
am 15. Februar 2025, 20:46 Uhr von SashaBu
Hard to rate this one. It's a great puzzle, but let down by technology. I think the ideal interface would be activated on selection rather than on "defogging" - that would let us use real numbers instead of pencilmarks, and it would save a few steps checking the view from a different cell (I kept forgetting and rechecking half the board, so quickly going through it with just the arrow keys would have saved a lot of time). Without changes to SudokuPad, it would have helped if the code were just a combination of cells from the grid - so we wouldn't have ro retype the entire grid from pencilmarks to get SudokuPad to acknowledge the solution.
am 8. Februar 2025, 05:01 Uhr von pdyxs
Updates to set the scene for the puzzle a bit better, and update formatting
am 7. Februar 2025, 14:11 Uhr von Marshal on Mars
The puzzle is enjoyable, but it does feel like it needs some as-yet-undeveloped software trick to avoid the constant erasing and rewriting of digits to check sight-lines.
|| pdyxs - Haha yeah, for sure. I actually considered not posting this one because it's pretty strange and ungainly, but it's also just really interesting...
am 4. Februar 2025, 15:05 Uhr von VitP
if you like skyscraper puzzles, this is skyscraper on steroids. it's actually pretty easy - as long as you know how skyscraper works.
and here it should be noted that skyscraper does NOT use "real space line-of-sight". the point is that the observer ALWAYS looks HORIZONTALLY, from a VARIABLE ELEVATION equal to the height of the adjacent building.
technical notes:
1) you will need to keep track of "region heights". use colour for this. 4 are needed.
2) use the large digits to LOOK around, but enter the building heights as middle digits. convert those to large digits at the very end.
>>> rules clarification.
The "hill" analogy is NOT appropriate. Line of sight ALWAYS works as for regular skyscraper puzzles, EXCEPT here you have to "look" from EVERY cell, in ALL directions.
The city planners decided to keep buildings of similar heights together, so there are "regions" (bounded by the red lines). Each boundary line has a high and low side, so that all buildings on the "high" side of a boundary line will be taller than the orthogonally adjacent building on the other side of that boundary line.
ALSO, because the rules are long and scary looking, put THIS at the BEGINNING:
"This is skyscraper on steroids. If that's what you're looking for, the long rules will not daunt you."
|| pdyxs - thanks for this - I really like framing the puzzle in this way, I think it'll really help! I'm gonna look at it over the weekend and make some updates
am 3. Februar 2025, 21:48 Uhr von VitP
"the height of a cell is irrelevant for determining what can be seen from it"
how can this be ? surely it's exactly the OPPOSITE ?
|| pdyxs - this refers to the height of the cell you're revealing, not the heights of the cells along the way. If you start taking the cell that you're on into account, you end up opening up lots of questions about perspective (technically, if you're at a 9 next to a 2 then a 1, someone standing on top of the 9 would see both the 2 and the 1...). For the skyscrapers rule to work as it usually does you kind of have to start at ground level.
I'm not super happy with the wording here but found it hard to come up with a better wording that can't be misconstrued in other ways. If you've got any recommendations, please let me know!
nice puzzle. rules recommendation added separately.
