Adjacent Clue Pair
Medium
Used by Smart Hint
Two clued cells sharing an edge only have a few ways to satisfy both clues at once — any side none of those ways use is forced, one way or the other.
- Cells that establish the pattern
How it works
- Two adjacent clues, checked TOGETHER instead of one at a time, only have a handful of ways to satisfy both at once.
- Trying every possible line/blank combination for the edges around both cells — keeping only the ones where BOTH clues come out exactly right and every dot's degree stays legal — narrows things down.
- Any edge that never appears as a line in any of the surviving combinations gets marked X; any edge that's a line in every one of them gets drawn in.
- This is the mechanism behind the named patterns below it in this list — Adjacent 3s and 0 Beside a 3 — and it finds them automatically, for whatever clue values happen to be adjacent, not just those. Learn the named shapes to spot them on sight; this entry is why they work.