Thursday, September 28, 2006

Grand Tour puzzles

For some reason, I love this type of puzzle from the Brainteasers Page-A-Day calendar. It has a deceptively simple premise, but is diabolically tough to solve. And once completed, they appear simple again, even beautiful. You'll need to print them out, and use a pencil AND eraser.

GRAND TOUR
Draw a closed path, following the grid lines, that goes through everydot and includes every black line. Here are two sample solved puzzles:



The trick is "closed path". Every point must have exactly 2 lines connected to it. Here are the puzzles, I found the square one tougher than the triangular one.





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6 comments :

Anonymous said...

I sort of did these quickly at lunch, and I might not have read the "rules" well enough.

Here are my answers....I must have the requirements wrong as I didn't find these hard at all. (first clue to my point)

Perhaps it is my having looked at PCB routing all my life.....but I'd go with my first impression above.

Here are my attempts:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigqueue/tags/puzzleanswers/

Here it is in a TINYURL in case the other one is too long:

http://tinyurl.com/gdbv8

Anonymous said...

oops...I just noticed a small problem. "follow the grid lines". When I printed it out I lost the gridlines.

I now see that none of my attempts did that 100%..I see a simple solution to one of them...but I have work to do and my ability to edit .GIF files is non-trivial so I will have to to it later today. (I have referenced the solutions listed above, and will put the correct one's back at that link)

Anonymous said...

Ok....I think I did it right this time. Still not that tough.I actually found the angled one to be tougher....but again, maybe the PC layout experience. (angled routing channels happen, but not all that often)

Same URL and TINYURL as above!

Angela said...

You gotta read the directions again... You need to include EVERY dot!

Anonymous said...

Ok...I rushed it and failed to read!

But I did it, and reposted it to FLICKR. (same URL)

The trapazoid actually "fell apart" as I looked at it driving home....I guess I wasn't thinking about work, and I seemed to just "see it".

I literally drew it one shot when I made it home as I ate.

The square....well, that was a little different. In the car I decided to attack that one a bit different. I decided to map our lines that "had to be drawn" as in outside corners...and then to look for lines that had to be drawn as a result of what was down at that point. (mostly points that had only one other point to go to since others on the three sides were aleady "full-up".

That still left quite a few options, but I had a basic map to start with...and I just brute forced the rest.

Anonymous said...

BTW....what was the significance of the STAR in each puzzle? I was looking to see if it ended up being an "eye" of some beast or some sort of starting point....but it seems to be a random thing. (just to throw off your concentration I guess....)