Friday 25 February 2011

Friday Puzzles #93

So no controversy in the difficulty rating this week I hope, as I’m continuing my trend of hopefully introducing new puzzle types to newcomers to the blog (hello!). This week it’s hitori – in a relatively small grid. With this size it’s a bit of a challenge to put out something that squeezes between totally trivial and fiddly lame puzzles that are all too common in the hitori world. I reckon I just about succeed with this one. Enjoy!
    #119 Hitori – rated easy
 
All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

3 comments:

  1. “I reckon I just about succeed with this one.”

    You bet you did.

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  2. While the starting point is much nicer than a typical Hitori starting point, I still am somewhat put off by the 1 to N solve characteristic. Just as in a very easy sudoku, it feels more like you’re showing an example of how thinking progresses than challenging me to think through the puzzle. Still, your guided tour was a pretty neat tour to take.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cheers Rohan, glad you enjoyed it.

    Thomas – I go with an ascending “theme” purely because hitori I think is an awful slog unless you can somehow incorporate a little more intuition in to things. Ok I could probably get away with a random permutation of 1-8 in a puzzle this size – although I’d still argue you’d lose something unless it was 8765.. or 2468.. or something else “intuitive” – but in larger puzzle sizes things just get impossibly tedious and it just feels like an exercise in finding needles in a haystack. And I say this as someone is who quite good at picking out “naked single” needles out of a sudoku grid haystack.

    I know you’ve argued before that hitori as a puzzle is largely flawed anyway, but I think for a small and easy puzzle there is some fun to be had, as simple as that fun turns out to be.

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