Intro
Planned SA tutorial takes forever to finish, so I decided to write a short post about the problem that I solved yesterday, while looking through past tasks from Deadline24 contest. The qualifications for this contest are very similar to Challenge24 and IPSC – they only give you inputs and they only want your outputs in return.
One task looked particularly interesting – it’s a direct adaption of something that is known as a dissection puzzle and it’s a type of diagram puzzle you can encounter during the WPC. The rules are very simple, you are given a shape on a grid, and your task is to divide (dissect) it into few smaller ones in such way, that each one of them looks the same. Usually rotations are allowed, but reflections are not. The ugly image on the left, shows an example of a solved puzzle. In this particular problem, the size of those small shapes is given. If you want to read the full problem statement you can find it here, but you don’t really need any more information.
If you have no slightest clue how to solve such problem, then let me assure you that everything is fine with you, since as far as I know (although there’s a small chance that I’m wrong) everyone solved this by hand during the contest.
This post will show you how to solve it in a very simple (conceptually), yet a bit unconventional way.