Trolley Problem
(Eingestellt am 28. Januar 2025, 18:27 Uhr von the_cogito)
This puzzle is
based on an absurd puzzle I set for Turn 2 of the Skunkworks League event on Discord. The original was much less forgiving, much harder, and not as fun, so I've extracted some aspects of it I most liked. I hope you enjoy!
Rules:
- Draw a single closed railroad (loop) in the grid that travels both orthogonally and diagonally between the centers of touching cells.
- Within the grid, locate "islands" of orthogonally connected shaded cells.
- Different islands may not touch orthogonally.
- The railroad visits every shaded cell and does not visit any unshaded cells.
- The railroad visits every island exactly once, where a "visit" ends when the railroad visits a cell in a different island.
- Assign the following value to cells visited by the railroad: 1 for straights, 2 for obtuse angles, 3 for right angles, and 4 for acute angles. Circled clues on a diagonal outside the grid give the sums of consecutive cells visited by the railroad on their respective diagonal, in the correct order. No clued diagonal is missing clues.
- A "?" represents a single such clue.
- A blank circle represents any number of such clues, including none.
- Different clues on the same diagonal must be separated by a cell not visited by the railroad.
Quite a mouthful, I know. I've set a solvable example puzzle to demonstrate the rules and to perhaps offer a chance to build some sort of logical foundation, should you want it:
Solve on Penpa (answer check on line only)
Solve on Sudokupad (no answer check)
The main puzzle:
Solve on Penpa (answer check on line only)
Solve on Sudokupad (no answer check)
Lösungscode: For every row from top to bottom, the number of acute angles in that row.
Zuletzt geändert am 31. Januar 2025, 17:35 Uhr
Gelöst von dumediat, nuzzopa, hepcecob, Default, csilva, Agent, Mr_tn
Kommentare
am 2. Februar 2025, 00:04 Uhr von Agent
Very inventive ruleset, thanks!
Zuletzt geändert am 1. Februar 2025, 22:01 Uhram 1. Februar 2025, 15:57 Uhr von Agent
Can the question marks represent a 0?
-----
They can't, I'll have to make updates to clarify that.
Zuletzt geändert am 31. Januar 2025, 21:10 Uhram 31. Januar 2025, 21:10 Uhr von Default
Very nice puzzle! The rules seem complicated at first but once it clicks it is quite elegant. Lot of fun to figure out what is possible within these constraints.
am 31. Januar 2025, 17:35 Uhr von the_cogito
Miscounted one row from the solution code, fixed now, sorry!
am 28. Januar 2025, 19:18 Uhr von dumediat
This puzzle is packed with a ton of clever deductions and was a lot of fun! It requires a lot of care and attention to avoid making mistakes, but is well worth the effort!