Well, thanks to Len, I managed to unlock my phone again, but now everyone knows my pattern, so I need to choose a new one.
For brevity, I won't include the explanation of how an Android pattern lock screen works again, but you still need to follow those rules (see previous puzzle).
Here's the rules for my new pattern:
- I still want to use all nine dots
- I'm still obsessed with mirroring, so it must still have reflective symmetry
- I don't like odd numbers, so the pattern's resulting line must have exactly two "ends"*
What should my new pattern be?
* by this I mean that visually, the final line formed by the pattern has exactly two dots which have a single line connecting to them. So, for example the pattern 2 1 3
has two line endings (at 1 & 3), but 5 2 1 3
has three (at 1, 3 & 5). All solutions found for the previous puzzle have three line endings.
Answer
Woah... I think I got it after a whole lot of trying around. Here is my train of thought:
- Since we have two open Ends and reflective symmetry, both ends must be mirrored.
- Since we can never directly go to an already visited point, the last point must be an open end - so one of the two ends.
- The two end segments (the last part, direct connection) cannot be directly connected, because we cannot leave the path and come back to a point.
Valid endpoints: 1-4 3-6 and 1-4 8-9
A . . . B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
| . | | . . Invalid: . . . .\./. .\. . . | .
. . . . ._. ._._. . . . . .\. . | .
Trying to connect the two valid positions for endpoints I realized I couldn't start at one of them, because I cannot leave the path and come back on the path - and without coming back on the path, it is no longer symmetric. So one of the endpoints had to be a hidden double-line (like 2-1-3) and the other the real endpoint.
So my path had to start on the mirroring point of this hidden path, since the mirrored path without the end-points would end there and has to be symmetric.
So the start-points for Figure A was 4 or 6 and for B was 4 or 8.
Some more trying around gave me this:
. ._. 4-5-6-3-2-8-9-7-1 |_|_| |_|_.
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