Spilled Candies
(Published yesterday, 23:00 by GiAnMMV)
Rules:
- Classic Sudoku: Every row, column and 3x3 box must contain every number from 1 to 9.
- Colored Dots: All pairs of orthogonally adjacent digits separated by a dot of the same color must have the same difference. Dots of distinct colors may not represent the same difference.
- Greater/Less: If two digits are separated by a "<", the smaller one in on the side where the "<" points to.
Play it online in SudokuPad.
Solution code: Row 9, left to right.
Comments
today, 15:14 by sfield
I read the description of the solve path from the other comment and that sounds like what was intended. It is not what I did. I may have stumbled on an unintended easier method because this only took me 20 minutes, which is MUCH faster than typical for me in a 2 star puzzle. I figured out what two of the colors that represented a difference of 8 and 7, which automatically gave me 6. And that lead to just 2 ways to begin moving up column 4, 1 of which lead to a quick contradiction. I used letter rather than numbers so I wasn't committing to which was high and which was low, but I arrived at the < sign very quickly in the solve, allowing me to disambiguate those. And then I had a bunch of numbers and all of the color meanings. From there it was very simple, more like a 1 star. Kind of wish I had seen the solution described by the other silver. It sounds more interesting. But a lot harder.
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The way I intended it was figuring out the dots' values in advance, then solving it. I'd say it's really easy too, maybe 2 stars is too much.
today, 07:04 by RenBanned
The way you can figure out which dots are each difference separated by the patterns and placements inside the boxes is very clever. I really enjoyed this, thank you! Very satisfying the way it disambiguates.
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Thank you very much!
