RoboZZle Forums

I find pretty much every puzzle you make to be hard. :P

Actually, what I had been indirectly referring to by my first comment is that this is a 2-part puzzle, and plenty of people have felt justified in rating this one down without solving part 2 as well. I intended them to be a package deal, and it seems unfair that anyone should rate this without solving both.

When I made the first symmetry problem I was quite suprised that a few people solved it almost immediately and rated it medium, but no-one else could solve it for many days. Then the next problem, which I considered was about the same difficulty was also solved almost immediately and rated medium, but by different players. Those that solved the first and considered them not that hard, were unable to solve the second and vice versa. I couldn't understand why so few people were able to solve both, and why those that could solve one but not the other would consider the one they solved to be not that hard when they were roughly equivalent. I thought if you can't solve one of them, then you must have found the other one hard too.

Turns out that there are multiple ways to approach a symmetry puzzle, and most people were not aware of all the methods, but were only using one specific method that they knew well.

So maybe the reason why so many people can't solve it, even though you think it's easy, is because there are two different approaches to recusion-type problems and I tend to use one method, and you use a different one? So the puzzles I find easy, you find hard, and vice versa.

I tried that... it turns the wrong way. Don't know how to fix that in the remaining zero commands. :-s

mark: It goes from a simple colored turning to something recursive (or at least did for me). The answers looked similar otherwise, and I loved the subtlety of it.

beaza: I find "Part 2" hard to approach and there are too many combinations to guess it. I often find the easy problems much more difficult than the "very hard" problems. I wonder if anyone else finds this to be the case or if it's just me? :)

It's interesting to me that at the time of this writing only 18% of players completing this puzzle went on to complete Part 2.

Very clever!