Paquita wrote:I tried a procedure to split the puzzles in boxes, puzzles split in two, the 4 (or 5) tridagon boxes and the remains. Recombining got me some more puzzles. It does not work with other tridagon puzzles like the T&E(3) puzzles. I did notice that the remaining boxes (not the tridagon boxes) have a low number of clues compared to average tridagons. There are about 5 clues in all 4 boxes combined. That is much less than an even spread of clues would give. This seems to be a property of the typical high BxB puzzles. And the tridagon boxes are densely populated with clues.
Hi Paquita,
That's an interesting remark.
Let's be more precise:
1) about "average tridagons". I guess you mean the T&E(3) ones?
2) about the 4 or 5 tridagon blocks?
Let's say there are 4 tridagon blocks + 1 block of "free" cells (i.e. free to have the tridagon digits), the block opposite the 4 previous ones.
So, I guess what you call "the remains" are the four other blocks - the "lateral" blocks.
In [HCCS3], Table 5.7, I reported results of a study of the total number of clues in two collections: the last mith's T&E(3) one and a T&E(2) one I called col-TE2 (made of the 3 coloin "mastemins" mentioned in previous posts).
I found that, whether one considers minimals or min-expands, the numbers of clues are very close in the two collections, but they are very different from the T&E(1) (cbg) and from the pre-tridagon T&E(2) collections in Tables 3.1 and 3.2.
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collection mith-TE3b col-TE2
minimals min-expands minimals min-expands
mean(nb-clues) 27.17 31.90 27.86 31.73
It's interesting to introduce your distinction between the two types of blocks. That's where a difference between the T&E(3) and high BxB would be noticed in the clues - statistically.
So, I would suggest two extensions of your work:
1) try to get more precise stats
2) extend it to the min-expands; is there still a difference?
.
