WiseWit Response 10417

Surely too late, but here goes: This is a NURIKABE puzzle The puzzle is played on a typically rectangular grid of cells, some of which contain numbers. The challenge is to construct a block maze (with no particular entrance or exit) subject to the following rules: 1. The "walls" are made of connected adjacent "blocks" in the grid of cells. 2. At the start of the puzzle, each numbered cell defines (and is one block in) a wall, and the number indicates how many blocks the wall must contain. The solver is not allowed to add any further walls beyond these. 3. Walls may not connect to each other, even if they have the same number. 4. Any cell which is not a block in a wall is part of "the maze." 5. The maze must be a single orthogonally contiguous whole: you must be able to reach any part of the maze from any other part by a series of adjacent moves through the maze. 6. The maze is not allowed to have any "rooms" -- meaning that the maze may not contain any 2x2 squares of non-block space. (On the other hand, the walls may contain 2x2 squares of blocks.) Solvers will typically dot the non-numbered cells they've determined to be walls, and will shade in cells they've determined to be part of the maze. Because of this, the wall cells are often called "white" cells and the maze cells are often called "black" cells. In addition, in the "Islands in the Stream" localization, the "walls" are called "islands," the "maze" is called "the stream," and the ban on "rooms" is called a ban on "pools." Like most other pure-logic puzzles, a unique solution is expected, and a grid containing random numbers is highly unlikely to provide a uniquely solvable Nurikabe puzzle.