Problem 289

[quilan]

Your post wasn't what piqued my curiosity really, it was more the fact previously there's been about 1 solver per day over the past weeks, yet this weekend popped up 18-20 in a row. It was just odd behavior to see.

[quintana]

@quilan

nothing strange with number of solvers, when you take into consideration all those who work together on very well known website...ok, one or two of them, and bunch of cretins who copy/paste answers. so, don't hate the playa, hate the game!

[harryh]

Don't hate anything /anyone, is what I would suggest.

Imho, whatever someone or some people do to submit an answer (cooperating or copy-pasting or whatever) does not affect at all the quality of the problems, the insights one gets through researching their essence and the pleasure of finding an efficient approach to a solution.

So, please, let each one of us concentrate on maximising whatever it is we get out of these problems and these forums; let us avoid flame wars, accusations and counter-accusations. There are plenty of other places in the web (and in the real world) where people fight each other. Do we need to turn this site into another arena?

[quintana]

merely explaining the numbers to quilan. no reply - no flame war, that's me motto.

[quilan]

Yup, no hating here either, just made me "O.o" when I saw it the other morning.

[hk]

As zwuupeape formulated it very nicely: "this weird coincidence was bound to occur. ".
If you read between the lines you will know enough.

[sivakd]

I'll be honest, I'm rather baffled by it. You can pretty much draw all 37 of the (2,2) scenarios by brute force on a piece of paper, and that should give all the information needed really... I didn't even blink for this one, whereas others had me stumped for a while.

Hmm, so far I had been lazy and afraid (of making mistakes) to manually draw all those 37 solutions for 2x2. Finally wrote a program to find and plot the shapes. I have been staring at those shapes for more than a day now and still can't figure out how to proceed even though I have spotted a few things. So at this time I tend to think that having the 37 shapes handy isn't going to make this problem automatically easy.