Currently, the Haunted Manor puzzle is the least solved community puzzle. At the time of this writing, it has only been solved by 13 CG members, despite the fact that it is a quite well designed puzzle and was published more than 6 months ago.
Part of the reason for this is Validator #4. It is somewhat more complex than any of the test cases, and many people have been blocked by this issue. (cf. Haunted Manor (community puzzle))
Well, I have taken the time to add a new 7x7 test to the puzzle (entitled Another 7x7 manor) which is arguably identical in complexity to Validator #4. Hopefully this will somewhat alleviate the issue.
So, that being said, I challenge YOU! If you have tried Haunted Manor and got stuck in the past, or if you haven’t given it a shot yet, go check it out! Can you solve the “hardest” community puzzle yet?
So with the introduction of the new puzzle summary page, you can see that only 11% of those who have tried this puzzle have succeeded. In the 8 days since I originally posted my message, one more person has solved the puzzle.
Has anyone else tried? Is the new test case useful, or do you think that more tests would be helpful? I’m curious.
After about 2 months, I’m going to call this first community puzzle challenge a moderate success. When I first posted my challenge, only 13 coders had solved this puzzle. As of today, that number is at 20 solutions.
I am satisfied that my call to arms has resulted in some well deserved attention for this worthy community puzzle. Here are some (just for fun) statistics based on published solutions:
[CG]jupoulton - 1 days (Java)
Plopx - 1 days (Java)
superredlark - 2 days (C)
IKarl - 20 days (Java)
player_one - 28 days (C#)
SatineChatounette - 29 days (C)
melmi - 48 days (C++)
SharkyRS - 74 days (C#)
magaiti - 78 days (Clojure)
SatineChatounette - 80 days (C++)
magaiti - 81 days (C++)
djjeck - 101 days (Java)
Skywalker - 118 days (C++)
Coelso - 192 days (Haskell)
ValNykol - 209 days (Ruby)
Kyran - 215 days (Perl)
mouton5000 - 223 days (Python3)
Yay! A very definite uptick in activity on this excellent puzzle! That was the goal. Congratulations to those who were equal to the challenge!
Just because I’m calling this challenge “complete” doesn’t mean that it’s too late to work on Haunted Manor. If you need a bit of extra help, or just want to play, here is a link to an online, playable version of this puzzle:
But yes, that is still a relatively new puzzle.