Can't the snake not touch itself either?

Brian Pwnox asked on Google, "for the snake, can the head hit the tail?"The snake may not touch itself, even diagonally, in any fashion. Precisely:No two orthogonally adjacent cells may both be in the snake unless they are adjacent in the snake's path.No two diagonally adjacent cells may both be in the snake unless another snake cell shares an edge with both.For the purposes of the crossover with Fillomino, the snake functions as any other polyomino, with the exception that its size doesn't care about the "no two polyominoes of the same size may share an edge" rule.I really hope this clarifies every question anyone could ever ask about Snake Fillomino.

For the no rectangles variant:
Is it "no individual polyomino can BE a rectangle (including squares)" or "no combination of polyominos can form a rectangle"?
The phrasing is a bit ambiguous to me. Of course for the latter, you'd have to except the fact that ALL the polyominos form a rectangle together.

No individual polyomino can be a rectangle.

Edited by MellowMelon 2012-10-23 7:20 AM

Thanks, I got it.

These are all worthy of being in a contest set themselves, my favorite so far is definitely the No Rectangles.

Edited by prasanna16391 2012-10-24 8:35 PM

A quick note about penalties: as the IB says, we doubt there will be any manual answer entry correction on this test. In particular, the penalty will stand if the solver is at all at fault for the wrong answer, even if it's a simple typo or a right answer submitted for the wrong puzzle. Please keep this in mind as you take the test and check for stupid things like that.

In addition to the Preview series from the two test authors above, there's also a Liar Fillomino by Para that can be used for practice -
http://puzzleparasite.blogspot.in/2012/10/puzzle-134-fillomino-liar...

Because I love advertising my blog. :P
http://chaosatthesky.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/puzzle-21/
Nonconsecutive Fillomino, in case this opening trick is used in the test.

That is truly Fillomino Fever all around :-)

Is the snake allowed to have length one? I'm just wondering because one of the puzzles I created (which was mostly a joke) would have multiple solutions if this were allowed. I hope that the snakes will have length more than one on the test :)

Don't think we ever really decided if there is such a length restriction. That will be a nonissue on the test.

The snake has "a head and a tail". Technically it would be of length at least 2. But I'm sure the authors won't make such joke puzzles ( http://kitkatksun48.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/fillomino-snake/ ) :P

Thanks for the excellent puzzles. This is up there with my favorite tests of the year. The Nonconsecutive, No Rectangles, Skyscraper were all superb. I unfortunately broke both Liars towards the end and couldn't get any submission in. I dunno about others, but at least with Liars I find paint far less error prone, and I solved both Liars fairly easily on paint later. Its difficult to mark the digits as true or false and then write over them on paper, compared to simple colour-coding in paint.

I'd love it if this Fillomino contest became traditional like the TVC. There seems to be a lot more ways to experiment with this puzzle.

The only thing I personally don't understand is that the penalty stands for entering the key in the wrong puzzle,etc. Not to sound bitter but to get a penalty for a puzzle I didn't even actually submit the answer to during the test is a bit harsh. Instant Grading is a nice way to show typos and such, but any reason why this time the penalty stays for these errors unrelated to puzzle solving?

And I second that.

How do we enter multi-digit answers? Eg: I am getting 10 as one of the 'digits' in a circle, but cant submit the solution since the total 'digits' is greater than 8. Could be a wrong solve from me, maybe.

@lenson, enter the unit digit (right most digit) in such cases
so 0 for 10, 1 for 11, 2 for 12, 3 for 13, so on ....

Enter only the last digit, as per the answer key instructions. A 10 should be entered as 0.
EDIT: Beaten :O

Prasanna: The basic rationale is that the warning about no manual entry correction was stated up front. Those who account for that and take the extra time to check the little things like that lose time in comparison to people who make small goofs and get forgiven for them later.

Edited by MellowMelon 2012-10-27 12:16 PM

Thanks for a really fun test! After enjoying FF1 so much last year, I made sure to give this one a whirl, and it certainly didn't disappoint.

As a merely sub-superhuman solver, I was happy to put away all the 6-point-and under puzzles (except Classic 4), and it was a thrilling finish to successfully crack the 'splurge' hard puzzle I picked to focus my last 15 minutes on, Walls (Bottom). Just couldn't resist, that empty grid of tetrominoes screamed "I'll be your favorite!", and they were right.

Like FF1, I look forward to working through the remaining gems in a more relaxed state over the next few days. Congrats Grant and Palmer, and thanks again!

Well, my opinion is that that gets penalized enough if you just don't award the points. Now say, someone puts X puzzle's key in Y's entry. If the person doesn't get points for X, then thats enough, and if it does later get changed, that means the solver took the time to change it anyway.

Anyway, I know it was mentioned up front, I'm not asking for a change, I just wanted to know why thats the case.

For Fillomino Skyscrapers

I made for OAPC 9, you can find here: http://oapc.wpc2009.org/archive.php?id=49

Also you can see: http://www.sachsentext.de/en/taxonomy/term/160

Thanks for the test. Really enjoyed walls, nonconsecutive, sum, and the last classic.

Pretty happy with how I did, although I'm not sure how I managed to break 5 puzzles (which were luckily all quite easy to fix.) -10.2 points is a lot...

Amazing puzzles in this. I'm EXTREMELY satisfied with my performance, considering my sub-400 rating. My favorites would be Classic 4, Hard Nonconsecutive(but I broke it), the Sum, and the Hard Walls (YAY http://kitkatksun48.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/fillomino-wall/).