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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3257 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 24, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've played so much liouh.com/picross/. It's a randomly generated puzzle each time. It's very responsive and lightweight. And you get a very colourful victory effect after painstakingly filling those cells. Sometimes you get a puzzle with multiple solutions but the game will only accept one and give you the disappointing grey ending if you arbitrarily pick wrong.

Just searching for it now, I found a new version, liouh.com/picross2/ which changes the game a bit so you can make a wrong move and correct it later, instead of having each mistake immediately pointed out. It feels a bit more like sudoku now.

I always thought that the best way to describe the game is "binary sudoku with regular expressions" but none of my CS uni peers agreed :(

edit: fixed links

1679718010868 has 2 solutions

Are the puzzles guaranteed solvable?

Yeah that's one example where there are two possible solutions but the game only accepts one. I think this is because each game is generated by first randomly coming up with the desired board state, and then deriving the row and column rules from that. But the same set of row and column rules can be satisfied by multiple board states.

However I put the same seed in the second version of the game and it accepted both solutions.

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