mhparker wrote:What does this tell us? Firstly, it shows that the observation that Andrew made about the V1.5 being no harder than the V1 (and possibly even easier) is correct. It also tells us - as we suspected - that both of these Assassins were One-Trick Ponies, where only a single (slightly) difficult move was required. Lastly, it tells us that both of these Assassins were relatively straightforward, provided one proceeded very meticulously.
Mike. That was an interesting discussion about both variants of Assassin 47 and how your old software had managed on it.
I hope that your comment "One-Trick Ponies" wasn't a suggestion that these puzzles were too easy to be Assassins. I felt that they were still Assassins but at the easy end of the difficulty range. Each of them must have taken me at least two hours, including typing up the first drafts of my walkthroughs although that doesn't add too much to the solving time.
We need a good range of puzzle strengths and variants do, of course, add to this. Easier ones are needed to encourage more people to solve them. Very hard ones are there to provide the extra challenge. We also know that Ruud gets some ideas for future Assassins from new steps that appear at times in walkthroughs.
In the discussion about variants started by Para, he was too modest to mention that he produced the excellent Assassin 44V2.
I looked at that one again this week and have just posted my walkthrough for it. There was already a walkthrough by Ed who found a more direct route to the solution.
In the introduction to that walkthrough I said
"A really challenging puzzle. It’s amazing how small changes to cages can make such a huge difference! The change to N2 wasn’t too much of a problem; maybe that was done to maintain symmetry as well as to take away an easy move. It was the change to N8 that really made this a V2!
Fortunately the changes provided some new pairs of innies to give something to work with and plenty of interactions between them. A V2 where things were taken away and nothing extra given in return would be even harder.
Ed did some useful combination eliminations for the 15(3) cage in N8 as early as step 6. I assume this cage was looked at early because it is one of the differences from the original puzzle, trying to get back to that one as soon as possible. That's an approach that hadn't occurred to me until yesterday although it now seems such an obvious thing to do. It was a pity that Ed's step 6 didn't also eliminate any candidates although it did allow him to remove a pair of candidates from the 13(2) cage in N8 in his next step.
I've included Para's very interesting shortcut as a comment. This shortcut is also in Ed's walkthrough."
Para has also produced an excellent Killer-X which is in another thread. Ed posted a diagram after a difficult point had been reached and he had discovered by plugging that position into SudoCue that the puzzle could then be solved as a vanilla sudoku-X. The rest of the puzzle was solved on that basis as a tag solution.
No walkthrough was ever posted for this puzzle as a Killer-X. I must admit that I haven't yet managed to finish it, although I haven't looked at it for about two weeks. If I do manage to finish it, I'll post a walkthrough. However if anyone else has already finished it or does so before me, please go ahead and post a walkthrough. Any good puzzle deserves at least one walkthrough!
I was just going to say that. Started following the walkthrough then deviated from the path a little, but still with the same result. I think the main fun people had was to carry on in non-killer mode after enough info was there to do it as an X-Treme.
Andrew wrote:
No walkthrough was ever posted for this puzzle as a Killer-X.
Apologies to Richard for that. Thanks to Glyn, Para and Ed (in a PM) for pointing that out. My only excuse is that, since I haven't yet managed to finish that puzzle, I haven't worked through Richard's walkthrough and had forgotten that he had posted it.
