I’d like to ask the good people of this community that, if you do know the solution or figure it out, that you not share the answer here. Feel free to announce your success, but there’s something to be said for discovering the answer completely unaided, even if it takes years.

It’s embarrassingly obvious once you see it though.

  • gigastasio@sh.itjust.worksOP
    441·
    11 天前

    Free clue: It’s not 15. That solution doesn’t work for the bottom numbers, and it’s very clearly stated that the 7 is not a typo.

    Edit: What makes this puzzle so good is that it tempts you with an “obvious” solution that works with all but the last set, but there’s an equally obvious solution that does fit every set, if you can shake yourself free of the fist one.

    • melvisntnormal@feddit.uk
      1·
      10 天前

      I wish I saw this first. I’m very prone to off-by-one errors.

      I opened the comments thinking that I solved it, then some comments with broken spoiler tags essentially spoiled the actual answer for me, despite my best efforts to ignore them.

      With these types of puzzles, I normally start looking for solutions that don’t just involve the obvious operations. Had I seen your comment first, I would’ve continued playing with the first thing I noticed (and later abandoned for the wrong solution) and I think I would’ve got there by myself eventually.

      Either others need to be more mindful of their spoiler tags, or I need to stop using Sync for Lemmy. It’s probably the latter; I’ve seen such weird formatting that only makes sense if I assume Sync’s Markdown renderer is broken.