Forums

Number: Puzzle #1830
Genre: Fillomino
Author: Bram
Appeared at: May 10, 2010

Really nice one!

It looked a bit intimidating, being very sparse with the givens and no completely obvious starting points. Fun to figure it out though, almost completely through analyzing space restraints. I haven't seen many like this.

Thanks. I wanted to try something different. Think it worked out nicely.

I liked this one too! The starting points are indeed really scarce. I think three stars would be more appropriate for this puzzle (it was - in my opinion - harder than some 3-star puzzles)

I asked about the rating as I wasn't really sure about it. I agree it could/should maybe be 3 stars. I don't know if it's really more difficult, you just have to get how the puzzle works to solve it.

There's a bunch of puzzles which use one trick/step/idea that if you get/see it make solving it much easier than if you don't. This one is impossible if you try to use your regular fillomino techniques at the start.
I never know how to rate those puzzles though. Because if everyone sees the trick, they'll say it's much easier, but if people have trouble seeing it, they'll say it's much harder.

I understand it is sometimes hard to rate the difficulty of a puzzle. And indeed, not everyone will agree on the difficulty of some puzzle. I bet other people will find this puzzle easy enough for 2 stars.

But I just don't

Very nice and unusual logic, well done

Marcin

Great puzzle. It required a different kind of strategy than most of these puzzles. Definitely not a two star puzzle, and it's harder than most three star puzzles.

Of course this was the puzzle that got me so frustrated with clicking things over and over and over to get all the high numbers that I almost gave up Fillomino puzzles on this site. They really need to change their programming so you have an option to enter numbers more efficiently, either with a click and drag of existing numbers, or moving the numbers over when you select the connecting line (if you know it connects, and you know it's 15 on one side, should copy the 15 over for you instead of having to click 15 times!). It's not as pretty, but even if it just checked the borders and not the contents you (so if the borders surrounded an area with 15 spaces then the contents must be all squares with 15s in them) that would be a great help.

The rating issues will always exist with puzzles like these, that do something different than normal.

The clue numbers can't be dragged as they are dead elements, but you can drag from numbers that you have already placed. You can currently only type numbers 1-9, so you are able to place a 9 click 6 times and then click and drag the rest of the numbers from the 15 you have already placed.
I understand placing the numbers over 9 isn't perfect, but you don't have to click n times on every cell to place the number.

I'm not a programmer and have no idea of the workings of these applets, so don't know what is possible.

There's also the mouse wheel: rolling it backwards while on a cell will cycle through the values in reverse. Unfortunately, it'll also scroll the browser window down if it isn't already at the bottom of the page. (I don't know if it does this with all browsers, it does with IE.)

I'm not at all familiar with embedded applets, but if the applet could stop mousewheel input it catches from going to the containing object (the browser), that would be a great feature.

Edit: Whoa! I just tried the mousewheel thing and I noticed the numbers go as high as 55 now. Is that a recent change? That makes it a little awkard to get at 15 that way.

I added the numbers up until 55 a few hours ago, by request.
I guess we could make some mapping from letters to numbers, like every multiple of 5 larger than 10...