Mystery Master	Analysis of Tombstone Geography	Member

This one-star logic puzzle has 3 noun types, 5 nouns per type, 3 links, 10 facts, and 1 rule. It needs 75 marks and 3 grids. I think this puzzle deserves 2 (maybe 3) stars. I will explain why.

Clue 1 says the populations of Coyote Canyon plus Thirsty Hollow equals Cactusville. There are a few facts we can derive, but the truth is we need to use a rule here. The simplest rule is to wait till the program makes an assumption for the population of each town, and determine if clue 1 is satisfied. If clue 1 is violated, then the program will undo the last assumption, and make another one. The rule I wrote is not the smartest one, so please see if you can come up with a better one.

This puzzle also requires two links: "larger than" which involves the populations, and "two further than" which involves the distances. This is more advanced than most one-star puzzles. The link "larger than" is set using SmartLink.getIsMoreThan().

The "two further than" link must be manually defined. This is because the functions in the SmartLink class reference the one-based number of each noun. The one-based numbers [1,2,3,4,5] do not correspond to the distances [1,2,3,5,10], so you need to write your own function.

The most interesting thing about this puzzle is clue 4 which says Thirsty Hollow is 15 miles from Brambleburg (as the crow flies). How does this affect the distances each town is from Tombstone? This does not require a rule, but it does require some thought.

I thought this was quite challenging for a one-star puzzle. Take a look at the puzzle module to learn more.