Patreon Reward: September 2019
Added 2019-09-06 16:36:01 +0000 UTCMassive thanks as always to all of you for supporting us here. In the attachment you'll find this month's reward, which mixes up Shikaku and Sudoku. We hope you like it!
Mark and Simon
Addendum: We've had several correct solutions to the meta but some requests for clarification. We've therefore made a one-sentence addition to the instructions in the attachment, which we hope will be helpful to anyone still looking at it. [The extra sentence is: "Solvers will have finished this Patreon Reward once they’ve finished the fifth puzzle."]
[Just to confirm as well that, in the video teaser, we deliberately obscured the links to the puzzles - so they'll only be available to you guys!]
Comments
In trying to figure out how hard it was for the author of this 5-part puzzle to work all of the strategies into a single Sudoku, I tried to create a random Sudoku and see whether I could get it to work as a good jigsaw Sudoku and as several good Shikakus. If that worked, I would try to work a message into it, as the author did, but without any of the unintended confusion. I succeeded in an hour or two on the first try. Go to this web address to see the Sudoku I created that is both a regular and a jigsaw, with a Shikaku beside it: https://imgur.com/vEf612j And there are hundreds of other ways to divide it into jigsaw pieces. Millions of good Shikakus are also makeable from my Sudoku. The one beside the jigsaw there took 5 minutes to figure out. The ones in the image below were even faster to make (I didn't bother erasing the unneeded digits in them): https://imgur.com/eH6kWnD At that point, I realized that there was nothing hard about finding a Sudoku that simultaneously works as a jigsaw and as several Shikakus. So for the author to have gotten stuck with the message he worked into Puzzle 3, could it be due to the difficulty of working any message into a Sudoku? No, it turns out that 100% of messages of 10 letters or fewer will fit into 100% of 9x9 Sudokus reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom. Perhaps he had to make a last-minute change, where the best he could do was the message he used. At any rate, here's a better message (left) compared to the same one he used (right) in my Sudoku: https://imgur.com/tC5DhBJ There are no typos in that image. Any seeming errors are simply my way of being "cryptic". You should be able to figure out what to do with the darkish cells and thus finish everything.
Kyle Corbin
2019-09-10 01:14:33 +0000 UTCHere are the illustrations for an alternate version of this Patreon 5-part puzzle. First, compare my version of the spelling part with the original concept. Copy this link into a web browser https://imgur.com/tC5DhBJ to see mine on the left, using lots of Crypticness without giving solvers a headache or a letdown. The several apparent typos are a good Cryptic flair, making it harder for solvers to find the message, but 100% clear once found. Note that almost any short message using only 9 different letters of the alphabet can fit into a Sudoku this way. Then look at this https://imgur.com/vEf612j to see how my Sudoku can work fine as a jigsaw Sudoku (there are hundreds of other ways to form the jigsaw pieces there) and as a Shikaku (There are millions of ways to make a Shikaku in my Sudoku. Here are two more https://imgur.com/eH6kWnD).
Kyle Corbin
2019-09-09 21:26:55 +0000 UTC
