Thoughts on Puzzle 30

[Ended] Hack the Galaxy šŸŖ
22

Thanks will try to do it again lol

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23

Now my take on this puzzle: I found it easier than others as it didnā€™t rely on knowledge of obscure english words.

Easiest to implement are rules 1 and 5

But the most important clues are 6 and 11. Think about all combinations that result in right number of letters.

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24

I was so sure I had it, but then my sudoku had multiple possible solutions AND none of the letters that came out formed anything close to a wordā€¦
I made a totally wild guess based on a combination of nonsensical answers I got and it happened to be it!!
Iā€™m going to try reverse-solving it tomorrow now that I know some actual guaranteed numbers :sweat_smile:

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25

Can someone who has solved it confirm the clues are all correct? I keep getting to a point where a one clue contradicts another or break the basic rules of suduko!!

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26

All the clues are correct. I solved it. And none of the rules of sudoku are broken.

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27

According to the schedule, this puzzle closes on 4 Sep. Can anyone tell me exactly when the deadline is please? It would be useful for me to know how long I have left to figure it out, as I have a busy weekend ahead!

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28

I believe itā€™s midnight GMT

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29

Same here I have read the instructions over and over again and I just donā€™t understand. I started to cry last night haha so I had to put it away. I donā€™t even know where to begin

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30

This is pretty rough, ngl. Iā€™m slightly too dumb (or too lazy) to figure out the givens, all Iā€™ve got is F so far, but Iā€™m stuck with the rest.

Instead, I tried to write a program to print out all the possible combinations of the possible letter combinations for the 9 values, but there are 387,420,489 of them and itā€™s just not feasible to sort through that way QQ

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31

I also wrote a code to determine all possible letter combinations, if you write it right, I can promise you, you can get a lot less than 387,420,489 (which also happens to be 9^9).

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32

Yeah, Iā€™m sure thereā€™s a way to filter out unreasonable letter combinations (ie, no word starts with ā€œcgā€ but Iā€™m not a good enough coder to do that yet. lol

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33

Itā€™s a lot easier than that. I spent 2-3 hours by hand the night it came out, no progress at all, woke up the morning of, solved it in less than 5 minutes using code. I believe you can do it!

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34

GOT IT! =D

Iā€™m going to slowly peel myself out of this chair now. XD

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35

Iā€™m brute forcing the diagonal with code todayā€¦ Whilst there are 9^9 possible letter combinations, that can be significantly pared down before you even start. I have a list of 9-letter words from the official US Scrabble dictionary, which Iā€™ve also pared down to around 4500 possibles. Stick it in an array and iterate with possible letter combinationsā€¦ Iā€™ll let you know if it works!

EDIT: Much to my surpriseā€¦ it worked! Iā€™ve entered a correct solution. Iā€™ll now try to solve the rest of the puzzle.

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36

I agree with igorgetmeabrain: I limited it to one by solving sudoku and it was very easy then :wink:

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37

No, you are not dense. You are onto something! Yes, for 3 givens to add to 25, youā€™d have to break Sudoku logic. Look real closely at the givens. Iā€™m sure youā€™ll see it.

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38

Right, there are ways to satisfy the listed rules while violating Sudoku logic. But there is a solution that fits everything.

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39

Agreed. Putting 6 and 11 together sets up a limited number of cases you need to explore. Then you can just run them down checking for inconsistencies until you find the right one.

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40

Totally agree. On most of the obscure english puzzles I code something to just get the answer, and spend time on crossword helper pages. I guess the only recent exception were the rockets, where almost all english world were common.

For this one I sure could code something, but I had actual fun just solving it manually, with a spreadsheet as a my editor of choice for taking notes.

Yes, it took a lot of iterations, but it was a lot of actual fun.

Same with the sudoku itself, and ir was a pretty classic, with no need for any advanced elimination techniques.

I wish for more puzzles like this, where the weight is on the actual solving, and not on flexing the english dictionary.

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41

YAY great job! Glad you got it!

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