Friday 5 May 2017

Puzzle #194: Arrow Loop

It's been a while since I've posted puzzles, almost a year actually. This month I'll be posting a few sets that I've provided to numerous puzzle championships over the last few months.

The first puzzle will actually be a puzzle that never appeared in a championship. It was originally was designed for the YKPA Open. The reason for this is that it came back as unsolvable by one of the testers. In the many years of having my puzzles tested, I haven't ever gotten the message back that a puzzle couldn't be solved, unless it had an error in it. This puzzle though, did not have any error. The problem with this puzzle was that I had made an assumption. This assumption involved a characteristic of loops, that I thought was well known and obvious. Both my testers weren't aware of this characteristic at first and only one could figure it out while solving. It was supposed to be a somewhat easy loop puzzle, but thus turned into a much harder puzzle, which I had no way of scoring the difficulty of accurately. So I decided to keep it out of the set. There's a hint below in case you need some help in solving the puzzle.

Hint (highlight to read):
Parallel bordering loop segments must always travel in opposite direction.

Rules for Arrow Loop:
Draw a single closed loop that travels through each cell exactly once. The loop is not allowed to touch or cross itself. Arrows in the grid indicate the direction the loop travels in from that cell.

 


2 comments:

  1. It's a pleasant solve. I was about to suggest you should have asked me to test-solve, but in the end I doubt it would have made the scoring problem any easier if you have one smooth solve and two "unsolvable". Thanks!

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