My Hanjie Process XXXIII

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.


I'm going to do things a little differently this time. Since I am trying to show how to solve a puzzle, it seems worthwhile to deviate from a standard approach to solving in favor of showing an alternative concept to what I have already shared. Despite the differences, I still have created a spreadsheet showing the latest progression. This one can be found at: https://1drv.ms/x/s!Ar3VXpGA-24u7Cst93pDHOrfWLCd

If you look at the first unsolved column, you can limit the options of where the 5 can go. If it's anywhere other than highest or lowest, the 1's surrounding the 2 will result in the shaded cell ending up as a 1 in the next column. This is impossible, so we know that the 5 has to either go in the top 5 available cells or the bottom 5.

This can be explained in a similar manner to how we worked last time. We can provide a guess of an unshaded cell at the top and an unshaded cell at the bottom.

From there, we would know two more shaded cells. Since these would both be 1's, the cells to the right would be marked as unshaded. This creates a 1 in the next column, which, as I have already stated, is impossible.

We know that the cell at the top and the cell at the bottom can't both be unshaded. Since the 5 can't stretch to both, they can't both be shaded. That means that one must be shaded but not the other. Since these cells marks the extremes of where the 5 can go, we can limit the possibilities of the 5 to the highest and lowest cells available. Again, I already stated this.

From here, we can actually check both possibilities simultaneously. I have used green for one possibility and blue for the other. Pay attention to the row with light red marking. If we shade the upper 5 cells (green), we know that the 1 has to go in the first of the remaining 6 columns. If we shade the bottom 5 cells (blue), we know the 3, a necessary space, and the 2 in the next column. That 2 would determine that the 1 in the light-red row is in the second column. For either possibility, the third through sixth of the remaining six columns will have to be unshaded. We can mark that as seen below.

That's enough for today, but we're still not finished with the testing phase. Unsurprisingly, my next post in this series will continue with the testing process.

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