Snake Egg by Murat Can Tonta
or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools using a composite mode where left click inside cell shades square, left click + drag draws line segment, right click inside cell adds dot, and right click on cell edge adds an x.)
Theme: Minimalism
Author/Opus: This is the 19th puzzle from guest contributor Murat Can Tonta.
Rules: Locate a snake (a 1 cell-wide path) in the grid whose head and tail are given. The snake can touch itself diagonally, but cannot touch itself orthogonally or revisit any square. Besides the snake, the remaining cells must form exactly nine white areas, one of each size from 1 to 9. Numbers in the grid must be part of white areas of the indicated size.
(Also see here: https://yureklis.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/snake-egg/)
Answer String: Enter the length in cells of each of the snake segments from left to right for the marked rows, starting at the top. Separate each row’s entry with a comma.
Solution: PDF; a solution video is available here.
Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 3:15, Master = 4:15, Expert = 8:30
Fascinating puzzle. Can hardly believe that it works, even after solving it.
I thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle, (which was my first introduction to Snake Egg). Watching the white areas grow felt like my favorite parts of Fillomino, and the unique sizes gave the flavor of an object placement puzzle.
I ended up using some intutition at the end. That’s probably a shortcoming on my part, (not enough familiarity with the constraints of a snake path to deduce and prove the ending).
I agree with Matt, it’s surprising that the puzzle is as smooth at is with so few clues. A very elegant construction.
Thanks, Murat! (And thanks to Serkan for inventing this puzzle.)
This one was really fun! It kind of has a nurikabe-like feel to it, even though you don’t know where the islands will be or, once you find them, how large they will be. Like Carl and Matt said, it’s impressive how smooth everything is even with so few clues.
Brilliant puzzle.
This was a total pleasure to solve (and I’m usually not even all that good at Snake Eggs).
As others have said, it’s a fascinating puzzle, with very much the Nurikabe feel to it.
I’m beginning to come to the conclusion though that puzzles with minimal numbers of clues on the board like this (and Monday’s Kurotto) tend to lend themselves to very straightforward solving paths.
– Neelix
You should have a go at those two, then:
https://nbpuzzles.wordpress.com/2015/01/02/gradient-fillomino/
https://nbpuzzles.wordpress.com/2015/03/05/checkered-pentominous/
My experience is precisely the opposite: it appears very difficult to me to make a sparsely clued puzzle that flows smoothly. This is why I find this Snake Egg so impressive.
I agree with this view on true min/max puzzles like Monday’s Kurotto or some of our Fools’ week puzzles last year. But I had no reason to suspect it would be true with Murat’s Snake Egg, as I too have seen examples of minimal clue puzzles that have one solution but are very difficult to solve. Nonconsecutive sudoku is one genre where just a handful of digits are enough for one solution but I most often have no clue how to place anything logically.
nice
Very elegant !
What do the A B C and D represent?, they aren’t mentioned in the description on either page. Also the reply “required fields” are not marked (using Chrome).
These letters are part of the answer submission for the puzzle (but do not have any influence on the puzzle itself, so please ignore them while solving).