hutt's puzzle dump

 I found out about the USPC through the Thinky Puzzles Discord and decided to try solving it this year, just to see what puzzle competitions are like. I found it to be very fun, despite having both slight nervousness and overconfidence before starting. The puzzle types introduced some new concepts to me I was surprised I hadn't seen before, especially the integration of Scrabble-like crosses in lieu of shaded squares in logic puzzles. One concept that I felt like expanding on after the competition was inspired by the choice to have a set of four puzzles each reliant individually on either the sum, difference, product, or quotient of the lengths of perpendicular runs or lines. It occurred to me that while I was familiar with mystery operation puzzles through KenKen and Math Path, I had not seen a mystery operation that related to perpendicular lines. I started making this ruleset using only the four basic operations in a sort of variant Balance Loop, before realizing that the Balanc...

 I was recently digging through some papers that were about a year old and rediscovered this puzzle idea. I'm pretty sure it was meant to be another take on the idea of Romantic Spot (see elsewhere in blog), but the ruleset ended up feeling a lot more cohesive and less arbitrary. The first two puzzles (one of which is solved for you as an example) were taken directly from the paper and the larger one was made on 8/5/24. Place a 0 or 1 in some cells so that all the digits are orthogonally connected and every horizontal/vertical run of digits forms a binary number that describes its length. It might not be obvious from just these puzzles, but this puzzle type does have the capability to get really explosive. For example, using proper placement, only three digits are needed to force a single solution in a 9x9 grid! And yet, somehow, this ruleset does have the means to slow down its expansion given enough space and care.