It’s time I revealed another of my secret skills: Puzzle Master!
But I’m not one of those half-men that only solves puzzles. No my friends, I have now become adept at creating puzzles. My brain-twisters will be a challenge for all non-genii, and should provide endless hours of entertainment to those that cannot count themselves among the hallowed brethren of the puzzle savants.
Curious to test and see where you rank in the world of puzzlers? Try this one first (you can print the full-sized version):
Good luck working out what that is without finishing it!
But of course I know there are some real smart alecks reading this blog, and I’m sure one or two of you may even be able to finish the above without more than 3 or 4 mistakes. Lest your heads swell, I’ve decided to present you with another of my creations to show you just how lofty the halls of the Gods Of Puzzling are…
And so! One of my greatest creations: a ‘god tier‘ difficulty (and quite positively Laytonesque) Picross for you to solve:
Print it and solve it! Send me a photo of the completed puzzle for a mystery prize! (If you don’t know how to solve Picross puzzles, read this)
Good luck 🙂
I’m going to do this. Starting that Picross is difficult though.
I did say it was ‘god tier’!
I’m serious about the mystery prize as well 😀
KLS seems convinced the Picross is above ‘god tier’ and into ‘just impossible’ tier. She correctly pointed out it doesn’t give the solver the usual starting point by having a row contain exactly enough cells for the described elements.
This made me wonder if there is a unique solution to the above, or perhaps if there are many. And then I thought this can easily be determined via Bernard writing code to solve the puzzle.
Of course this itself would be a challenge since there are 2^(38*26) unique 2-bit images possible using a grid of this size. But then any such code written would automatically discard rows that don’t satisfy the hints…
To motivate Bernard (or any manual solvers out there) I have decided to raise the stakes. Where once I was going to give only a ‘mystery prize’ I have now elevated it to a ‘very special mystery prize’ 😉
I’ve already considered writing code to solve it. The problem is NP-complete, so the running time grows exponentially as the grid size grows.
However I reckon I could brute force a 50×50 grid pretty fast. I’ll see what I can do.
Dude, I’m supposed to be writing an essay…