Wei-Hwa’s challenge this week is a distance puzzle like the ones created by Erich Friedman. Wei-Hwa uses the puzzle to plug the Google US Puzzle Competition that is happening next Saturday (more on that later) and, I have to say, that competition is where I first came across distance puzzles.
Distance puzzles involve a series of circles arranged in a specific pattern. The object is to fill each cirle with the numbers from 1 to however many circles there are such that the distance between 2 and 3 is greater than the distance between 1 and 2, and so on. If you would like to see some examples of this puzzles, check out Erich’s page.
Wei-Hwa’s variation is a little bit different. He doesn’t require you to fill in all of the squares, and I haven’t decided yet if that makes it easier or harder. Also, his flash interface automatically calculates distances for you when you place numbers. (Do you remember your distance formula?) It might be a good idea to play around with his interface a little before you get solving, just so you can get a sense of how many possible unique distances there are betweem two numbers.
I’ve gotten all the numbers from 14 down to 2 in, but that’s as close as I’ve gotten. I’ve used a systematic approach, and I’m fairly certain I tried all the possiblities, and I’m stuck…I’m sure I missed one, but not sure where. I’ve made a few SMALL discoveries (based around the distance formula) but I haven’t found any definitive pattern or anything…definitely tougher than a sudoku. Anyone else got any ideas?
[...] So, the instructions are out giving us a tate of what the test will be like. There will be a distance puzzle on the test, and 3 sudokus by my count. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the puzzle types before you start. And you might want to make sure you know what exactly rotational symmetry is, or the formula for calculating a balance around a fulcrum point. [...]