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  • 65 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: February 18th, 2026
  • MatSeFi@lemmy.liebeleu.detoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world•Find CowEnglish
    2·
    12 days ago

    Yes, this would work — but it comes with a subtle statistical bias: the character ‘W’ ends up underrepresented. With a naïve “avoid COW” approach, only about 25% of the grid will typically be ‘W’.

    A more elegant solution would be:

    • fill the grid completely at random
      • search for every “COW” cluster
        • whenever one is found, copy a random character from one cell in the cluster into another cell of the same cluster
      • Iterate until no “COW” remains

    That keeps the distribution much closer to uniform while still guaranteeing a valid puzzle. Then just insert the single “COW” manually wherever you want the hidden solution to be.

    Julia code example 
    s= (320,180)            #size
m=rand(['C','O','W'],s) #random init
c=1
while c>0      #iterate till solved
    c=0
    for i in 1:first(s)
        for j in 1:last(s)

            #check for 'COW' in each cluster of 3 and copy a character
            #from a rendom cell to an other random cell of the cluster if found
            
            if i>2 &&  m[i-2:i,j] ==['C','O','W']   #vertical
                c +=1
                r =shuffle([1,2])
                m[i-r[1],j] = m[i-r[2],j]
            end
            if j>2 && m[i,j-2:j]  ==['C','O','W']   #horizontal
                c +=1
                r =shuffle([0,1,2])
                m[i,j-r[1]] = m[i,j-r[2]]
            end
        end
    end
end

    The neat part is that this preserves an almost perfectly balanced character frequency.

    For comparison, the puzzle in the example image seems to contain roughly:

    C: ~260 (~25%) O: ~520 (~50%) W: ~244 (~25%)

    So the original author clearly used a different generation strategy.

    Possibly on purpose: visually, ‘C’ and ‘O’ are much easier to confuse than ‘W’. Reducing the number of 'W’s therefore increases the search difficulty. In that sense, the approach suggested by @[email protected] is probably preferable: keep the distribution mostly balanced, but intentionally bias it just enough to make the puzzle psychologically annoying.

    I wonder if there is a non iterative way to generate this puzzle with a ‘uniform’ character distribution 🤔

  • MatSeFi@lemmy.liebeleu.detoWorld News@lemmy.ml•Israel now occupies more of Lebanon than Russia occupies in Ukraine
    27·
    1 month ago

    The isolation Russia is a direct response to the 2022 invasion. Before that, Russia was a member of the G8, a massive / main energy partner to Europe, and widely integrated into the global economy. Those bonds where cut after the invasion, not before.

    Regarding you second question: I don’t see many other options for the Ukrainian government. The tragedy of forced mobilization on both sides is clear, but the responsibility for that tragedy is by the party that made mobilization necessary in the first place.