Friday, 16 February 2024

Freddie Hand

Walkthrough for yesterday's Shakashaka: https://youtu.be/XSEwP854ljI

Magnus Carlsen has won the 2024 Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T Challenge, to the surprise of no-one, having defeated Caruana in the semifinals in convincing fashion. This is a chess format where the location of both players' pieces are randomised at the start of the game, leading to 960 possible starting positions.

Well, strictly speaking there are at most 959 positions that can appear - if the random position is just the starting position for standard chess, then it's just standard chess. Though that would be pretty funny.

I'm quite busy with learning openings for all the possible positions right now so I don't have any time to introduce today's Kurotto (Windows), which wasn't even made by me - it was stolen from my evil clone who escaped from a mirror. Mountain climbing has some surprising benefits.

Rules: Shade some cells so that clues represent the total size of the orthogonally connected areas of shaded cells that share an edge with the clue. Clued cells cannot be shaded. Cells in the same position in corresponding windows must have the opposite shading.

If you need a refresher on how Kurotto works, here's the latest one in GAPP by Riri:

2022-09-30-riri: Archive: Friday, 30 September 2022

Acquire a Speedy Sloth 🦥 by solving the puzzle in 2:15 or less!
Obtain a Quick Crab 🦀 by solving the puzzle in 4:45 or less!
And all solvers who complete the puzzle will be rewarded with an Clotted Cream-winged Cinclodes 🐦

Example (Penpa+): http://tinyurl.com/2d7la7z4
Puzzle (Penpa+): http://tinyurl.com/2b9rzown