Great Britain Map with Heptominoes

(Well, I say map, you'd have a tough time trying to navigate with it.)

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Bit of a change from the usual fairly symmetric and geometric shapes. Inspired by the maps of Italy and Bulgaria done with octiamonds and pentahexes here I decided to try my hand at creating something in that vein myself.

This time there was another hurdle in addition to the solving itself - actually finding the initial shape to begin with. But I had recently disovered that the Conway's Game of Life software Golly allows images to be pasted directly into the grid, converting them to black and white in the process. So by scaling down an existing map to a small enough size then throwing it into Golly, I would be able to read off the cell population, i.e. the total area in unit squares. Then once I got a map that had an area close to 756 (108x7) it was just a case of manually tweaking a few pieces of coast to get the value perfect. And also to iron out any anomalies that had been caused by the scaling process.

The solve was mostly by hand, but with the last pieces done by computer because I'd tried manually without any luck for a couple of hours and I needed my precious table space back sooner rather than later. The coastlines were done first, since some of the knobbly bits demanded particular pieces, then I worked my way down from top to bottom filling in the remaining inner void.

Here's the finished product:

It's just the mainland, because if I wanted to include everything else, all the islands etc. I would have to make sure every last one of them had an area that was a multiple of 7, and that sounded like hard work. Maybe some other time.

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Lewis Patterson. Last updated 08/08/21.