(no subject)

[zotmeister]

You'd think that, when testsolving for a competition where most puzzles don't have given rules, people would read the rules for those puzzles that do have them very carefully. I know I thought that. I was apparently very wrong. [facepalm] - ZM

UPDATE: More importantly, you'd think that the testsolvers would be given the complete instructions to begin with. [headdesk] But even more importantly than that, you'd think that the constructor would provide an error-free puzzle so that the previous two would even make a difference! [bodyfloor]

Comments

[mellowmelon (from livejournal.com)]

Nifty; that one was the highlight of my weekend.

Just curious, is there a purely logical solution to the final puzzle (where the answer is extracted)? A large group including SnapDragon and I stared at it for a good while and got a little over half of it after being very clever, but we moved on when other people guessed the answer from our progress and confirmed it. I'd take another look except our team never digitized it so I'd have to reconstruct it.

[zotmeister]

Thank you very much! You just made MY weekend :)

There is a deducible means of solving all the grids (all were composed without computer assistance), but the last three nodes on that last grid are a doozy, no doubt about it. I would need to have the puzzle in front of me, with me actively trying to solve it again, to describe it.

I've got the puzzle available here: http://members.cox.net/ztm/Scotchy-v2a.zip

- ZM

[mellowmelon (from livejournal.com)]

I do have all of that; it's just that I don't have the final grid filled in, and I haven't found the time to go through the mechanism again.

[zotmeister]

Ah. At the moment, I don't have a ready-to-solve version of the final grid, but I'll be putting one together tonight for the solution page. I'll post a link to that as well once I have it done. - ZM