A Daily Puzzle · The Arcade

Between

Two of every number, in a row. The two 3s have three tiles between them; the two 5s, five; and so on down to the ones, side by side. Fill the empty cells so every pair is spaced by its own value.

Your tiles — tap one, then tap a cell

Solved

Why this puzzle can't lie to you

These arrangements are Langford pairings, named for C. Dudley Langford, who in 1958 watched his small son stack two-of-each coloured blocks and saw one block between the reds, two between the blues, three between the yellows. He asked when it could be done. The answer is exact: a pairing of order n exists if and only if n ≡ 0 or 3 (mod 4) — so 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12 … work, and 5, 6, 9, 10 are impossible, no matter how you try (Priday and Davies, 1958–59).

Every day's board is built from a named seed and then proven to have exactly one solution — the site's verifier searches the whole space and confirms a single completion, reachable by pure logic with no guessing. That's the honest edge of this arcade: a normal puzzle app hopes its daily is unique; here it's a checked fact.

The deeper story — how the number of solutions explodes, why the impossible orders are impossible, and the Skolem cousin — lives in the stratum Langford Pairings.