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> Scrolling

Chrome on Windows 10, nothing fancy. I move pick the scroll bar on the right with the mouse and move slowly down, perhaps to the middle and try to find a empty range, and when I release mouse it goes back near the top. As a guess: Have you tire to scroll at the ame time that other player is solving puzles in the same section? Try section 1.

> requires no backtracking

I have more background in Math Olympiads and plain Math. You can do backtracking to find a unique solution if you write all the options and discard all-1 of them. It sounds fancier if you call it "Reductio ad absurdum" :) . It's an usual trick, and my recommendation is that if you are in the middle of a problem that ask to fill a board and you have two(or more) options, first copy the board as many times as necessary and intermediately fill the two(or more) possibilities, to avoid forgetting one of them.

For games like minesweeper, sudoku or nonogram, my personal criteria is that if I can run the backtracking in my head, it's "thinking", but if I have to draw the two(or more) boards it's "backtracking".

For me it's probably only two options in a square, no further branching and only two or three steps deep before the contradiction. (If your name is Magnus, everything is "thinking".)

(By the way: Nice game implementation!)



Yeah, while large portions of the online logic puzzle communities tend to agree that puzzles should not require backtracking (after all one can often trivialize the intended logical solve path like that), it has proven difficult to define what should count as backtracking vs a simple obvious contradiction that should count as a logical step.

Ability to visualize it in your head, without needing to copy the board, or make temporary marks is certainly not unreasonable for complicated puzzles. That is the same rule as Simon uses for logic puzzles (mostly variant sudoku) on the YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic.

It isn't the most satisfying way to delineate the dividing line, since how much a person can track in their head can vary, but coming up with other rules can be absurdly tricky. Especially if one wants to make a set of rules applicable to multiple types of logic puzzles. After all simple two to three step contradictions may be unusually powerful for some types of logic puzzles, while they can be the basic deduction type for a different one.


*intermediately -> immediately




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