The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[udosuk]

According to this article, the Ostrich is the largest species of bird in this planet. It also has the longest legs and lays the biggest eggs. And it has the famous/hilarious behaviour of sticking its head into the sand when there is danger. I wonder if JC knew all these facts when he chose it to represent the (1,5) leaper in his JSudoku solver program.

So here is a 6x6 Sudoku variant puzzle as a tribute to this fascinating animal. The main rules are Ostrich-Non-Consecutive and Anti-Ostrich, not involving any other animals/chess pieces. By the way I also made the dimensions of the blocks unknown: you have to determine whether they're 2x3 or 3x2 blocks. Lastly I picked 0-5 as the digits instead of the more conventional 1-6, just to give the good ol' 0 a guest appearance.



Yep that's it. Just an "egg" at the feet of this big birdie. And the unique solution can just be "hatched" out of it!

However, I don't guarantee the human-solvability of this puzzle. As usual I just enjoy producing puzzles with the minimum given information and caught this 1-clue beauty by accident!

[HATMAN]

Wonderful, I’ll give it a go.

[Smythe Dakota]

Uh, would someone care to tell us how the Ostrich moves, please?

Bill Smythe

[Jean-Christophe]

It's a 1 by 5 leaper.
For comparison, the chess' knight is a 1 by 2 leaper.
As Udosuk said, it's probably not human-solvable.

[udosuk]

As Udosuk said, it's probably not human-solvable.

But HATMAN, adding only 2 clues, has made it a human-solvable puzzle:

Code: Select all

......
0.....
......
4.....
......
..0...

All other rules stay the same.

[udosuk]

Uh, would someone care to tell us how the Ostrich moves, please?

Now, getting really curious to this question, I sought help from google to know how a "real" Ostrich moves. No luck from wikipedia but did find some very interesting articles.


The following question/answer about working in an ostrich farm made me laugh for a few minutes. Apparently ostrich is more dangerous than we think.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080317141933AAROkqD


This is what we should do if we ever encounter one:

http://www.wikihow.com/Survive-an-Encounter-With-an-Ostrich


More info about how to breed them:

http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/alt-ag/ostrich.htm


From the following article, we know "Ostriches move in a sort of harem, with several females to each male." But still nothing about the body/leg mechanism on how the bird really move.

http://www.centralpets.com/animals/birds/ratites/rtt4445.html


Sorry for bringing it way off-topic. But it's really fascinating!

[Smythe Dakota]

It's a 1 by 5 leaper. ....

How disappointing. An Ostrich can move only if it's on the edge, and then only to two cells. There are only two possible Ostrich tours, one on the white cells and one on the black, if you color the grid like a chessboard.

Bill Smythe

[HATMAN]

Bill

That was what I liked about the puzzle - even with the Ostrich doing very little it is still unique with one clue.

Maurice