Friday, February 27, 2015

Snake

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How are we to seat them within our only 8 remaining spaces?" frowned the manager of the theatre. Everyone was well aware of the problems of these eight people. They came as a group, but each person loathed one or two of the other people and could not stand to be near them.
The assistant manager gestured to the plan of seats remaining. "I have made eight counters to represent each of the people in this group. I have numbered them logically. Person 1 and 8 only hate 2 and 7 respectively. All the others hate the numbers on either side of them." He rubbed his chin in thought, "the only problem is how can we arrange them so that no-one is right next to anyone they hate?"

Place the counters 1 to 8 in the grey squares above such that no two consecutive counters are adjacent to one another horizontally, vertically nor diagonally.

Snake Puzzle Solution

Counters 1 and 8 need to be in the middle since they each have only one number that they cannot be neighbours with. Hence 7 and 2 must go in the sidewings, and the rest is trivial.

3 5
7 1 8 2
4 6

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