from Hacker News

Every 5x5 Nonogram

by eieio on 5/31/25, 12:14 AM with 86 comments

  • by okayestjoel on 5/31/25, 12:41 AM

    This is my game! I was recently curious about how many 5x5 nonograms can be solved purely with logic, no guessing. After running my nonogram solver on all 33,554,432 possible pixel combinations in a 5x5 grid, it turns out the answer is 24,976,511.

    Inspired by One Million Checkboxes, I thought it would be cool to create a realtime, collaborative nonogram game where we can collectively try to complete all ~25 million of these puzzles. Just launched it this afternoon and its already at 65k solved!

    Let me know if you have any feedback.

  • by punty on 6/1/25, 3:02 AM

  • by scythe on 5/31/25, 5:24 AM

    This is a downright hazard. I scrolled down to find one that wasn't solved yet, and the next thing I knew it was 30 minutes later and I had solved a hundred of them.

  • by bspammer on 5/31/25, 8:55 AM

    This is great, but someone is going to ruin the fun with a bot eventually, I hope you have a way to remove “solves” by IP.

  • by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF on 5/31/25, 3:53 AM

  • by tantalor on 5/31/25, 3:53 AM

    No but really how do I play. Do I click something to start a puzzle?

  • by mdtrooper on 6/1/25, 2:05 AM

  • by fph on 5/31/25, 11:47 AM

    There must be a swastika picture in there, somewhere.

  • by anxiousbuddhist on 5/31/25, 3:25 AM

    This is a ton of fun!

    A really useful feature would be to hide finished and/or in progress ones so I don't have to scroll forever.

    Great work, nicely polished, cool idea.

  • by NooneAtAll3 on 5/31/25, 5:46 AM

    idk if it's a bug or smth, but it keeps resetting the page to the top of the section

    I can't start solving from the middle

  • by Waterluvian on 5/31/25, 11:09 PM

    It seems that this has every 5x5 nonogram. And that none of them require guesswork. Ie. You can derive the answer by following an algorithm without ever having to undo a step.

    That means that no 5x5 requires guesswork.

    Surely there’s got to be a maths video about this. It seems like an incredible little quirk…

  • by Waterluvian on 5/31/25, 10:21 PM

    I love this idea of collectively solving some set of puzzles.

    But I don’t understand how I can. The UI design seems broken.

    First I couldn’t interact with any puzzles until I realized these were already finished. But how do I get to unfinished ones? I scrolled forever and didn’t find one.

  • by butz on 5/31/25, 5:46 AM

    In my youth I was considering drawing all possible 8x8 1bit color pixel icons and never got around to it. Probably it is the time to finally do it, and maybe even go further with 2 bit colors?

  • by x-complexity on 5/31/25, 1:20 PM

    I haven't seen anyone say this out loud, so here's my $0.02:

    Since every box is either filled in (1) or not (0), a solved 5x5 nonogram can be encoded as a 25-bit unsigned integer. So would a 6x6 (36), 7x7 (49), 8x8 (64), etc.

    ... So if desired, an AES-256 key can be encoded as a solved 16x16 nonogram. The perimeter hints can then be derived by Alice and given to Bob as a weak form of information obfuscation.

  • by manarth on 6/1/25, 7:58 AM

    Love this, but seeing "There was a problem communicating with the server." very often. Bots or HN hug of death?

  • by charcircuit on 6/1/25, 2:38 AM

    I suspect it's being botted now. The solve rate when massively up while the user count went down.

  • by marssaxman on 6/1/25, 12:01 AM

    I knocked out a hundred of these last night - what a fun concept.

  • by egoburnswell on 5/31/25, 10:14 PM

    Somewhere in there there's a 5x5 swastika