Talk:Solve a Hidato puzzle

Needed improvements

I'm really reluctant to admit this as a full task just yet, as it is dependent on a complex applet in an external website. Better would be to put a description (which could involve a link to wikipedia) and specific problem to solve in this page. We can always judge for ourselves whether someone's solved the actual problem or just the specific instance of it. –Donal Fellows 13:31, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

How about two separate task? One for creating the puzzles, one for solving them? --Michael Mol 17:39, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

It seems like an interesting problem but there really needs to be more supporting information for this task.

• The linked WP article wp:Hidato is of poor quality and provides very little of use, there isn't even a through discussion of rules there saying how to get to the solution. The solution doesn't seem to be full of consecutive numbers in every row, column, or diagonal; and it certainly isn't clear how the numbers got laid down. Some lines are consecutive except for one number. Others aren't consecutive at all. There may be a method but it's far from obvious.
• What's with the Knights Tour extra credit reference (we already have a task)? Maybe it's an easy step up but I don't see it and the task already seems complex enough. It's a nice fact that this can used for this, but why make it even optionally part of the task?
• I think this is a solution task. Generating a board should be another task.

Generally if I can't figure out most of what I need to do a task (at least broadly) from the task page then I'm not very interested in going off and researching it. Nor am I interested in reverse engineering the entire solution from a language I'm unfamiliar with. Task descriptions should be be able to paint enough of a picture to draw in contributors without requiring potentially a few hundred contributors to do that level of research or translation. That's my $.02 --Dgamey 19:57, 12 January 2012 (UTC)