Rules for Slitherlink
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Puzzle #51: Slitherlink
After the WSC and WPC my puzzle energy has been really drained. I don't think I'll post regularly for a while. This puzzle is the only puzzle I wrote during the whole championship week. It is meant as a Slitherlink Pattern Tutorial. I wrote is as a response to my teammates asking if there were patterns they didn't know. So I showed a few I like to use in my puzzles. Then I decided to just create a puzzle around all of the ones I had shown. I added one or 2 more little tricks I also like to put in. It's not a complete package of tricks for my puzzles. I have put some others in puzzles too. But figuring out all patterns in this one should get you along a fair bit in my Slitherlink puzzles.
Rules for Slitherlink
Rules for Slitherlink
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Very nice puzzle. However, I used uniqueness at some point (got stuck otherwise). Was uniquness one of "patterns"?
ReplyDeleteMarcin
Don't think so..I made it through without uniqueness.
ReplyDeletePls give me the answer
DeleteI love the idea of sharing slither link isolated number patterns that are determinative of a partcular path that can be inserted quickly. The problem with simply incorporating them into a puzzle is that ome may be lost on the solver. How about a simple post with a listing of them and others on your blog could add any additional ones they know of. Would be great for those f us who feel we don't know all of them. Thx.
ReplyDeleteTheSubro
Hi
ReplyDeleteYeah, that post is going to come. I want it to be more comprehensive than just posting patterns with forced lines and crosses. I'm trying to add a few things to make it seem easier to read for people and make it more complete. This isn't always easy for me, so I'm taking some more time to write it out properly before posting it.
I should have probably done it the other way around, but it had only occured to me that I should probably explain all patterns like I did when I had people solve it at the world championship.
When everyone says patterns, I sort of had in mind large chunks of loop you can put in straight away. Maybe I'm missing these, but instead I solved via a few single edges of the loop becoming apparent here and there, which then suddenly joined up in quite a satisfying way.
ReplyDeleteI especially liked how this was harder than nikoli, without having the clunkiness to the solve that something like kwontomloop has...
Well, when I say patterns it doesn't have to be hug chunks of loop. It's more the things you can put down without looking at the whole puzzle and around which the puzzle is most likely built. For example when you have 2 horizontally adjacent 3s or 2 diagonally adjacent 3s, part of it always solves the same, so you can put those bits down instantly. There's a whole lot of those patterns and I put a bunch of them in this puzzle. You can still figure those lines out while solving. But it's much easier if you just know them and you can put it down instantly when you see them.
ReplyDeleteCsn u give me the answers to puzzle 51
ReplyDelete