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Spent a similar amount of time... Ended up with a "solution" that breaks 1 constraint. Must have erred somewhere, but backtracking is only leading to other 1-broken constraint outcomes. Sigh.
Official solution from the original author: https://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/2013/coinheist.com/rubik/a_re...
Thanks though. I tried again on my laptop and got it - was a bit easier with a larger display than on my phone.
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I found other patterns that I thought were unsimplified, but (spoiler alert) in the end it turned out that all of the seemingly-unnecessary details were important for the solution! E.g. [^C]*[^R]* LOOKS unsimplified, but it actually means that if the string contains an R, the preceding characters CANNOT be C.
Or if the string contains a C, a subsequent character can't be an R? Doesn't it really just mean a string can't contain a C followed by an R?
Reload if you don't see the regexes turn bold when you click in a hex!
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The solution: https://www.i-programmer.info/images/stories/News/2014/Dec/B... Aren't crosswords supposed to spell out a word? This feels like random characters. Unless i'm supposed to rotate it or something?
Think sudoku rather than crossword.
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Some people would be correct to think that. That is what those regexes mean. If you are secretly prepending a ^ and appending a $, then you are not using the regex displayed.
Sorry, but you're wrong. There's nothing about regular expressions that means you have to use them to search for matching substrings. That's just one particular operation that uses regular expressions. It's not a quality inherent to regular expressions themselves. There are many different operations you can perform with a regular expression besides a substring search. Python, for example, has a fullmatch method.[0] l…
In Mystery Hunt puzzles, which this originally was, "we have to interpret this in a way that would allow there to be a meaningful and unique solution" is not only a perfectly legitimate form of reasoning, but often necessary!
It's not really exactly the same kind of reasoning, but in a puzzle I wrote a year before this for the same event
https://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2012/puzzles/into_the_woodstock/...
you could look at it and say "hiragana is only ever allowed to be used to write Japanese!!!" but insisting on that rule (much as it applies in most situations) wouldn't give the puzzle a meaningful solution. :-)
Maybe a closer equivalent would be that in this year's Mystery Hunt, there was a puzzle using a set of variant Hashiwokakeru (Bridges) logic puzzles. There were hints about which rules were changed but it wasn't stated whether the rule changes applied individually (one puzzle each) or cumulatively (when rules get changed, they don't change back afterward), or some other way. So, it was necessary to make assumptions about what was meant and see whether they allowed a solution. That's typically considered fair and appropriate throughout Mystery Hunt-land.
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Think sudoku rather than crossword.
There is an answer extraction, though, because it's a Mystery Hunt puzzle (where all puzzles extract a word or phrase as an answer at the end). It's just that the individual diagonals in the grid as a whole are not themselves words.
The final clue I had to complete was that tricky .*(.)(.)(.)(.)\4\3\2\1.*
I thought this would be a true crossword -- i.e., it'd have /words/ to solve for ... :/ Really neat puzzle though!