This comes out from the halls of Metafilter, and a post there by Wolfdog. Pixelogic is a webpage where every 5×5 Nonogram puzzle (which you may know by the trademarked name Picross) is on a website, and as people solve them they’re marked off.
Part of the fun of most Nonograms is making a picture, and very few of these come out to anything. In the screenshot above 9,303,414 there looks like a crab, and the one above 9,303,408 whose number is cut off is obviously a helicopter, but the rest is pixel gibberish. It’s amazing, though, that one can make even that out of these random blobbies and garbages.
But on the flipside of that, 5×5 puzzles are really easy! It’s a simple matter to do one, and after that another, and so on, and then an hour has passed and you’ve finished hundreds. Add to that the job of just working on something with lots of other people, and you have a damn addictive time. The puzzle software is friendly too: left click to mark squares, right click to mark empties. The solver automatically marks Xs in spaces where they logically must go if you’ve filled all the spaces on a line of column. And unlike many of the Picross implementations on Nintendo systems, there’s no penalty for making wrong moves, although you’re not informed when you fill an incorrect square either.
To work on these, I suggest scrolling way down the page and finding a block of unsolved ones, as the site doesn’t filter out finished puzzles, and then working outward from there.
I realize I’ve assumed that you already know how to solve Nonograms/Picross here. A full description would be verbose and probably unneeded, especially since you can probably figure it out yourself by just looking at the solved puzzles on the site, but just in case:
You have a grid, right? Along the top and left side are numbers. The numbers indicate the runs of filled blocks in the solution of the puzzle. Take this example:
2 2 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
This horizontal line must have two sequences of filled blocks in the solution:
🟩🟩❌🟩🟩
That one was easy, but usually the full solution isn’t so, and must be deduced using the intersections of the rows and columns.
Try it out, but do it soon; more and more solvers are joining on every day, and even with 24M puzzles in the list they’ll probably churn through them all in around a month!
