Towards the end of last year Grant Fikes ran a puzzle construction contest on his blog: instructions, results. With the aid of random.org, I managed to defend the title from the previous Logicsmith Exhibition, tied by score with Nikola Zivanovic.

The objective was to construct a 10×10 Masyu puzzle that leaves over a battle ship fleet of empty cells while minimizing the number of clues. That turned out to be quite a fun challenge, and led to some rather nice puzzles, which I didn’t quite expect. I was a bit worried the contest would be won by optimal computer-generated submissions, but it seems no one went to that effort. Instead, I’m left curious as to how close to the optimimum we got with 8+7 clues.

Here are my two submissions (rules).(solve on pzv.jp)

(solve on pzv.jp)