I love the concept. I was left wanting more because larger puzzles are apparently not more difficult, they just seem to have a lot of solutions. But can we make them more difficult? Just in case anyone else wants more of a challenge... I hand-wrote a 10x10 that should be harder to crack:
Unless I made a mistake, the simplest solution is not easy to find. Obviously I was thinking about an algorithm to create harder "Jumping Julia" puzzles. Definitely doable, but for now I'll leave it at that!
Knowing that a typical maze will have branching paths at the beginning, but necessarily one good path at the end, I find it easier to start from the goal and work my way backward.
This is great. Simple to get, not too simple to solve. One I will share with my kids, plus now introduced to Julia Robinson festival. Thanks for sharing.
Or for the mathematically inclined: How many n x n puzzles with unique solutions exists for a given size n?
n=1 is trivial, and n=2 it small enough to enumerate with 3^4 = 81 solutions, but many of them being degenerate (no solutions), but already n=3 is pretty bad with ~20.000 possible puzzles. I do not see an obvious path to compose solutions either and make use of some kind of structural induction.
I'm fairly sure the only solution here is 2 down to 3 right to 1 to goal. You can of course then use this to generate a couple of more by changing all the numbers that are impossible to reach.
Otherwise fun!
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