Substantial

[zotmeister]

I'm in the mood to make a big puzzle. And I mean BIG. Like, at least three times larger than what I've typically presented. I figure that if I'm going to start in on something that substantial, I may as well make something others are interested in solving. Rather than host a proper poll and bind myself to its results, I'll simply peruse the comments to this message, see who says what, and take it into consideration along with my own desires to choose what I construct. So what would you like to see? Oh, and make it snappy - I'll probably start work on this on Thursday. - ZM

Postscript: I have some emails to send out to those I've received puzzle solutions from. I'll get to those tonight. You haven't been forgotten♥

Comments

[avenger314.livejournal.com]

I just thought of this a few seconds after I hit the post button.

I thought of a puzzle that is PRECISELY the kind you would love... why not invent a battlefield, a la Disgaea, and challenge your readers to cause an optimal geo panel chain reaction? Even without the roleplaying elements, the geo panel system would make for delightful puzzles.

Jim

[zotmeister]

Can't find Syren? Send in what you have and maybe I'll help you. Or maybe I won't, but I promise I won't insult you, and it would be useful knowledge to me to know where a solver may get stuck. I figure I'll at least tell you where you should be looking.

I'm actually glad you asked about puzzle types. I could mention that The One Ring doesn't fit that format you gave, but that'd be splitting hairs. I have really only one cardinal rule regarding what I'm willing to present here: Only present that which is patently unambiguous. If I can't precisely detail instructions, or if there are multiple solutions, then they aren't the type of puzzles I'm looking to present. Contests may be a different story - the idea there is to come up with the best solution, and there's a great deal of variety in what 'best' can mean - but my puzzles should be rigorous.

Let me give you a glorious example:

Puzzles Without Rules

It is a crying shame that that site is no longer updated. Jeb Havens is a genius. Many of his puzzles are quite elegant, and some I think are even perfectly fair, but as much as I admire his handiwork, that route is one I do not choose to take. I don't wish to invite interpretation to the art of the puzzle; lateral thinking problems don't give you a way to check your answer yourself. I don't want anything necessary hidden from the solver that e can't deduce on es own; I wish to exercise my solvers, not stump them.

Perhaps the most imperative reason is that I want to build puzzles that anyone, given sufficient time, can find the solution to, even if they need to make guess after guess to learn why certain things don't work. Hopefully they'll learn from those guesses and not need to make them in the future.

To be honest, I have a contest in the planning that is not entirely deductive - it'll be a mixture of classic puzzles and the sort of trickery that runs prevalent in alternate reality gaming. But as I noted, that's a contest.

With that established, I don't feel constrained to grids and lattices - those just happen to be easy to illustrate. The magazine-style "logic problem" (the second example you list) is not beyond me; my problem with the format is that many composers of those problems (and their editors) don't have a sufficient grasp of logically rigorous English authoring to actually build such a puzzle properly and unambiguously. I have the required skill, and point to my concise puzzle instructions as proof♥, but there's another issue: culturalism. Such a puzzle requires understanding more than just the rules; it requires understanding of every given clue. I have lots of Japanese puzzle books, but I can't solve their logic problems any more than they could solve mine, and that bugs me. They'd have to translate a lot more than a rules list, and hope that the translation is perfectly rigorous, something VERY difficult to achieve. If I build a logic problem into a story - like I did once or twice in the Sanctum days - then I may very well do just that and present it here, as at that point it'd be worth it, but if it's just a puzzle, I can probably do better.

I do have some gridless ideas. I was toying around with a card-game puzzle; my brother suggested an origami-themed puzzle. I also have board-game ideas, which have a grid but that things move around on (I actually made one of those for my last Sanctum Puzzler). Your Disgaea-themed idea would fit into that nicely. And then there's the intuition-based grid-filling puzzle archetype, which I'd be ecstatic to present if I ever figure out how to prove a given solution is unique... - ZM