Re: Twin puzzles with a difference
I really enjoyed both of these new varieties of twin puzzles
Thanks, michaele
I didn't begin well, though, because I made the silly mistake of just printing the puzzles and starting to solve them without reading the instructions or even paying attention to the title of this thread
For a long time, I believed each twin puzzle to be "just" a set of overlapping or neighbouring
non-twin puzzles with some shared cages
Having struggled to solve these supposedly non-twin puzzles, I was frustrated to find in the end that neither of them seemed to have a unique solution
One funny thing about my getting it wrong: You may have noticed that the three-cell "
0-" cage that straddles the neighbouring puzzles in the second set has a surplus broad line that makes it look like a
two-cell "
0-" cage
with an empty one-cell cage to the right of it. Most puzzlers probably realise right away that the intended layout is a single three-cell cage because the apparent one-cell cage lacks a descripton and because a two-cell "
0-" cage would be unsolvable (the cells would have to contain the same number, which would then occupy different positions in the same row in the two neighbouring puzzles, breaking the "twin" condition). But if the puzzles had been
non-twin like I thought, a two-cell "
0-" cage in that position might indeed have been solvable, and I worked for a long time on the assumption that you had included such a novelty on purpose in order to surprise and challenge your fellow puzzlers
A note for new calcudokuers: Twin puzzles are usually two separate calcudoku puzzles, shown side by side, that have a shared solution. That is, even if each puzzle may have more than one valid solution, there's only one arrangement of numbers that works as a solution to both puzzles (you could say that the solutions, not the puzzles themselves, must be "identical twins"). These new varieties by michaele, in which the twin puzzles are overlapping or neighbouring and have some shared cages, still retain the condition that the arrangement of numbers in each of the "twins" must be the same.