Genre Spotlight small update + Puzzle 279 (Numberlink)

Hi everyone!  I hope you've been having fun with the puzzles in the Genre Spotlight series so far.

I wanted to let you all know that the series will be taking a small 2-week break as I prepare for my trip to Boston next weekend, in addition to some job interviews I have lined up within the next few days.  I've been running the series with no backlog as of late, and I'd like to spend some time queuing a few posts to make my life a little easier.  (In particular, I tried writing some puzzles today and I just ... wasn't feeling it, whoops.)

The next few posts will probably be focused on genres found during LPO preparation.  I'd rather wait until after the contest concludes, just so people who read this blog don't get a potentially-unfair advantage.  But rest assured, there are some cool types in here, and I'm excited to share them when the time comes :)

Regardless, I didn't want to leave this post entirely devoid of puzzles, so here's a silly Numberlink I doodled.  Note that, unlike my usual puzzles, the symmetry for this one is mirror, not rotational.  The reason for this should be pretty apparent.

Puzzle 279 (portrait)

Puzzle 279 (landscape)

 

 

Puzzle 210 (Numberlink)

Have a Numberlink.  Not much else to say.

Online interface

Puzzle 205 (Numberlink)

Another Numberlink, this time monster sized!

I originally used pzprrt to attempt to prove uniqueness as always, but after 4+ hours of running it had yet to find a second solution.  (My original attempt was non-unique, and pzprrt took 2 hours to find a second solution.)  After posting the puzzle on PuzzleSquareJP anyway, someone linked me to this program.  It's an incredible solver, somehow claiming uniqueness in only an hour!  Given how old the program is I'm surprised it's not more well-known outside Japan.  Maybe that's because nobody in the west constructs Numberlink puzzles at the rate Nikoli does.

Pzprrt is probably more convenient in most cases because its puzz.link implementation makes up for the time it would take to input the solution into the above external program.  But it's nice to know that constructors have been using programs for 15 years to verify uniqueness; it makes the constant output from Nikoli make more sense. 

Online interface (puzz.link)

Puzzle 204 (Numberlink)

It's been a while since I posted here.  Have a Numberlink!  This was also posted to PuzzleSquareJP.

Online interface (puzz.link)

Puzzle 170 ("Statue", Numberlink)

Yes, we had to include Numberlink as a genre in the Logic Puzzle Open.  Lots of people know the type as Flow Free®, and we were conscious about inserting several types that would be familiar to many of the contestants.  This was one of the puzzles I made for potential use in the competition.  It has a nice visual theme and flows nicely, but has slightly higher clue density than I'd like.

Online interface (puzz.link) 

Puzzle 162 ("Pairs", Numberlink)

What's this, another Numberlink?  That's right, and now this genre is getting close to having the most puzzles on this blog.  (The current record holder is Cave, even though I haven't posted a puzzle in that genre in 20 months!)

Very happy with this theme.  Empty spaces have been a weakness of mine when constructing these, so I tried to be more conscious about looking at places in the grid where paths should turn.  That proved quite helpful here.

Once again, thanks to pzprrt for checking uniqueness.  My first version was horribly, horribly broken, but I managed to find a fix that made parts of the puzzle more interesting, which was great!

Online interface