Puzzles #592 & #593 - Thinking Rooms (Heyawake)

Some number of months ago, someone pitched the idea of a future where AI and other tools are used to replace the creative process of making puzzles. I - and others - thought that, uh, sounded like a horrifying dystopia. I made three Heyawake puzzles to attempt to show the different sides of tool-assisted construction, and make the point that a human touch is always going to be better.

I started with this layout, which was an attempt to have a manual seed that I would just bash numbers into until I had a working puzzle. However, this process ended up requiring a lot more manual effort than I expected as there would frequently be multiple or no solutions from a given start. I'd say the tool use definitely helped with the construction, but then again without attempting to use the tool I probably would have settled into one of the more forcing starts more immediately.

puzz.link interface

I then made another puzzle entirely by hand, only using the tool to verify uniqueness. Given the shorter timeframe and that I'd already made a puzzle with an unchecked difficulty, I aimed intentionally a bit easier.

puzz.link interface

I, uh, also went out of my way to make a completely unchecked abomination of a puzzle with no intended solve path, just for the potential extreme of a generated puzzle. I... am not going to link it to not subject any puzz.link/db users to the puzzle, but also... just look at it.

I don't know about you, but that's not a world I want to live in.