Thursday 7 June 2012

Puzzle #112: LITS; Inversed

Today's puzzle is a variant on the LITS genre. I don't remember seeing it before. Constructing it went smoothly, although there were some points at the end where it caused trouble to keep it unique. Hope you all like it.

Rules for LITS

Colour some squares to form a single contiguous wall. The wall has no 2x2 coloured areas anywhere. In each blackbordered region a shape of 4 orthogonally connected squares remains empty. Identical shapes in different regions can't touch eachother by a side. Rotations and reflections are considered the same shape.




5 comments:

  1. Spent a long time staring at this - and then suddenly the resolution of the middle and top right came to me. I guess strictly speaking it's not quite inverse LITS since you also need to "use" a 2x2 region of empty squares. Maybe inverse TOILS? :)

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    1. That's how it went in construction as well, where I set one region and the other 2 just resolved themselves.
      I was thinking STILO (LITS in reverse and an added O). Inverse Nuruomino would work as well.

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  2. Great puzzle, solved and enjoyed!

    I checked with an anagram engine, "TOILS" is the only universal accepted word with these 5 letters.

    Suggestion: "Identical shapes in different regions can't touch each other by a side." This sentence would be clearer if you state the "shapes" as "shapes of empty squares", because "identical shapes of walls in different regions" do touch each other in this puzzle. (It would be special to create a puzzle where identical shapes of both walls and empty squares do not touch!)

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    1. Well, I just wrote it the same as in the normal LITS description. I figured the shape referred back to the word shape earlier used.

      I liked STILO as stylo is a word for ballpoint pen in Dutch (mostly Flemish Dutch I think). I just think that LITS works better for people to realise the relation to LITS better.

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  3. Points taken.

    I agree that since "LITS" is not a valid word in the first place, "STILO" shouldn't be a problem anyway. In fact imagine if the Japanese creators named the puzzle "LIST" instead of "LITS". It would have been impossible to easily search for these puzzles on Google etc!

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