Puzzle Duel

[pinkagape]

Who is Azade77? They’re clearly great at sudoku but it’s not a username I recognise.

[detuned]

pretty sure its Tantan

[pinkagape]

That adds up. Thanks.

[pinkagape]

Congratulations Desirée on winning Yellow League!

[pinkagape]

Who is Incredie, do we know?

[Calump]

Who is Incredie, do we know?

Looks like a new-ish Chinese solver
https://logicmastersindia.com/forum/vie ... &uid=23393

[pinkagape]

How exciting! They seem very good indeed.

You’re getting some great times lately, Calum!

[Calump]

Thanks! It's the first month I've been using the site and I think it went pretty well except two puzzles (and I see they are rated less than 1/5 in the archive, so it wasn't just me)

[pinkagape]

Not wanting to jinx him, but Aleksei has had a great first half of the month. Keep going!

[pinkagape]

A great third place! Well done!

[Umnik]

Thanks! PuzzleDuel leagues are dumb until you get a good result, in which case they are perfect :)

[pinkagape]

Hi

Does anybody have anything they can share with me about the hard Statue Park from last week?

I was able to do a few placements and then identified that the I was hard to place but couldn’t make it work wherever I tried. Is this the approach and one of those was the key or is there something else I need?

[Puzzle_Maestro]

Thinking about where to place the I was the key for me. It's perhaps helpful to think about this in tandem with placing the six pentominoes with a 3x3 bounding box (F,T,X,Z,V,W). Intuitively, both horizontal placements of the I create 2xn area in the bottom rows (which can't contain a 3x3 pento) and the black circle that's part of the I can no longer be part of a 3x3 pento. The puzzle should solve pretty quickly after placing the vertical I. (Start with the X, then the Z just above, etc.)

Unfortunately I was tempted to try efficiently packing the top left and wasted most of my time there...

[detuned]

Without wanting to make my username public, was surprised I had quite as good a time with this as is apparently the case.

I can only vaguely remember the details, but I recall trying a couple of things before stumbling on the answer. I saw a couple of possibilities top left (my first try) but it took quite a while to break. I definitely remember thinking about the I as well. As always it’s useful to keep an eye on the “to be placed” pieces, but in this case the 3x3 pieces wasn’t something I thought about much. In this case it was more vaguely how am I going to get 12 pieces in full stop.

Maybe I got a bit lucky, but it seemed to me that the right and middle of the puzzle were a lot more tightly constrained than the looked - once I got going with something that looked to make the most of all that space the solution came pretty quick.

[pinkagape]

Thanks both. I think trying to fit the 3x3 is great advice and would have got me the I in.