Re: Congratulations jpoos!
Thanks guys!
I figured I would probably to be able to beat Sheldolina's time sometime, but to get from a 4.0 to a 3.6 was quite... unexpected...
If you're curious what the puzzle looked like, it followed the following pattern (Patrick, is it possible to pull the puzzle from the logs?):
a b c d
b a d c
c d b a
d c a b
The way I look at this is as if it's made up of 4 2x2 blocks which look like
a b
b a
These kind of puzzles are my favorites, since they can be solved incredibly quickly (of my best 25 times, 15 probably came from these).
Once you know one of the 2x2 blocks follows the pattern, the entire puzzle has to follow the bigger pattern, making this pattern very easy to recognize: in this case, a1 was a single cage 2 and b1-b2-a2 was an L-caged 10+, and from there I immediately made the guess that that 10 had to be 4+4+2 and that the puzzle would follow the pattern; luckily I was right.
From there, I went to the bottom left 2x2 block. Because you know it follows the pattern, you only need to really deduce one cage, and can blindly fill in the other 3 from there. The same goes for the other 2 2x2 blocks.
All of this can be typed very quickly once you're used to it (even though I'm still able to mess this kind of puzzle up way to often), with no time loss on moving around in the puzzle.
So there you have it