Dominos

This is a Domino Puzzle:

Your task is to take a standard set of Dominos and lay them out in the above pattern.

There is only one way to do this.

And I know this because I created the puzzle myself using a computer program I wrote in 2008. I found it recently while looking through my old project archives.

The easiest way to solve the puzzle is to make a list of all of the available dominoes, then try to locate the ones that can only go in one possible place on the grid. In the example puzzle, for example, there is only one place you can put double-six.

After that you will find that some dominoes are forced into a particular location because that is the only shape of piece that will fit. In the example this will happen with the two-five domino in the top right corner after you have placed double-one and double-zero following the guidelines in the previous paragraph.

When you place a domino you can then draw a line between all other occurrences of that pair of numbers in the grid.

To solve the above puzzle you’ll need a few extra little tricks, so I won’t spoil it for you. Suffice to say that it is possible and you can do it by hand, no computer needed.

The basic C++ puzzle generation source code is published here.