Hacker News Reader

This took me down the rabbit-hole of the author's website, mindsports.nl, which has a number of interesting problems in puzzles and games. I was particularly piqued by the China Labyrinth and related family of puzzles:

http://www.mindsports.nl/index.php/puzzles/tilings/china-lab...

It will be more difficult to sleep now that I know nobody has answered the question: "Why do both known 16x16 solutions to the Octopuszle feature the same diagonal complex?"

View on HN

Thanks for the pointer, this page is really cool. It looks like someone here found a different Octopuszle solution: http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=99760

Looking at the four corners of the solutions on mindsports.nl, the pieces are nearly identical, and in particular the diagonals are identical. It makes sense that the two hand-solvers would use this symmetrical configuration. The programmatically found solution has different corners.

Still, that amount of constraint is surprising. It would be a nice surprise if that corner symmetry could be proven to determine the diagonal complex.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com