My Hanjie Process XXXII

If you have visited my Mental Exercise blog, you are probably aware of the fact that I have been making hanjie/nongram/griddler/crosspic/piccross/edel/Japanese puzzles for years. I have decided to show my process from start to finish on how I actually put these together including development of the image, preparing the numbers, testing, and conversion to PDF.


Once again, I have a spreadsheet to share. This one is at: https://1drv.ms/x/s!Ar3VXpGA-24u7CmgBqbpUJcFFcZq

This part of solving is trickier that what you have seen so far. Simply looking at a single row or a single column is not enough. We are going to look at the fourth column and see if we can find an impossible location for the 5. If the 5 went at the bottom, the bottom 4 would have to be shaded. Since the last segment of that column is supposed to be a 3, we know that this will be impossible.

One way to establish that the bottom cell is impossible is to mark it as shaded, but in a way that it won't be confused with other shaded cells. Create another mark for unshaded cells. Once you establish that the puzzle is unsolvable with the bottom cell, you can mark it permanently as unshaded. Remove all of the marks.

For the Excel-based example, I have used red to indicate the segment of 5 that is being tested, which is required if the bottom cell is shaded. Dark green shown what would have to be shaded. Light green would have to be unshaded.

Remember that for testing purposes, if a wrong answer can lead to a solution, the puzzle can be considered impossible. The puzzle would have to be modified in such a case.

Now that we know that the bottom cell can't be shaded, we can mark it as unshaded. This also narrows down the 5 enough that we can get one of the shaded cells in the column.

We can momentarily resume the normal approach to solving, and finish off a row. Once again, we are stuck. I will find another cell next time, and go from there.

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