Ending 2013

2013 is nearly over.

For the past month I’ve been fighting with Sony about my broken laptop. All my puzzle files are there, it is certain that there is no hope of getting them back. I backup my files regularly so I’ll have to wait and see how much is actually missing.

The WSC/WPC ended a long while ago but I just got my report up. I wrote some of it while in China, when my mind was still fresh, so the slightest details are there. You can see the Semifinals and Finals coverage below. I still have some photos left so those will be sprinkled in the preliminaries excerpt, which I’ll eventually get around to do.

Now onto the events. One event is planned before the end of 2013.
Also, Nikoli Hurdles 2 will be held early 2014. You can find the results of the first edition here.
Some Nikoli puzzles are obviously more popular than others. Nikoli Hurdles 2 will feature more obscure types.
In fact, I haven’t even written any familiar types for Nikoli Hurdles 2!

As much fun as it sounds but that won’t be good for newcomers. I have no idea what common Nikoli type people like these days. Perhaps, you can help me. Below are 12 types that come up a lot in the world wide web. I’ve omitted Nurikabe, Numberlink and Yajilin because they already appeared in Nikoli Hurdles 1. Please tick the types you personally like, you can choose up to 5 answers.
Oh and no one gets to see the results just yet. Poll closes in one month from now.

I appreciate your votes. Thank you!

[Edit: 12/12/2013 – Poll Closed]

Solutions to Nikoli Hurdles – 5/5

600-700m: Mochikoro
I wanted one not-so-known variant and Mochikoro came to mind. In fact, I listed a lot more of rare Nikoli types hoping to include a few of them. I settled for less when I thought the idea might deter away newcomers. If there’s another set of Nikoli Hurdles, do expect less familiar types.

For this puzzle, I strived for symmetry for almost an hour but settled on the odd 1 in the top right corner. When you have a reasonably hard puzzle, adding their symmetrical counterpart botches up its difficulty. If someone understands the basics of Mochikoro, then this puzzle shouldn’t be too hard because no difficult steps are needed.

700-800m: Country Road
This is also a first for me. I wanted to come up with a new break-in before drawing up a grid. I played around with the two crosses that each housed a 5. The top-left U pentomino was the starting point. We know that the path must enter and exit two of the four arms of the cross. The 4 in the top-left U pentomino meant that the left arm has to be used.

Now look at how the crosses lie on each other. Either the bottom or the right arm of the first cross will be left unused, which means the left arm of the second cross has to be used. The path exits the second cross through the bottom arm and the top of the puzzle falls easily. After this, the rest is elementary.

When constructing I put the pieces into the grid and added their symmetrical counterparts as I go. The regions are symmetrical but you can’t use the same deduction for each side. In all, I thought this was a good and interesting puzzle.

That’s it for the puzzles in Nikoli Hurdles. Thank you everyone for your kind comments, feedbacks and overall participation. I’m thinking about Nikoli Hurdles 2 but not in the near future as there are other things I’d like to get done. Please look forward to other experiments I will be trying out somewhere over the rainbow.

Solutions to Nikoli Hurdles – 4/5

400m-500m: Numberlink
Constructing a Numberlink can get really messy. This puzzle came from my puzzle shed. I was trying to see if I could make a symmetrical Numberlink and this was produced. I solved a few of Palmer Mebane’s usually high-quality Numberlinks to see how he caters in the symmetry without botching the overall solve. I made about 3 puzzles and ended up using this one which I felt was the easiest. Nikoli regulars would crunch this in seconds I’m sure.


500m-600m: Nurikabe
The two 4s in the centre has only one correct orientation. The rest becomes trivial. I’m not sure if this layout has been done before. The drawback is that the pattern is so cramped up that there is no room for any big islands – a feature I usually enjoy seeing in a Nurikabe.

 

 

 

Solutions to Nikoli Hurdles – 3/5

200m-300m: Fillomino
I spent about 45 minutes making and tweaking this and it still didn’t end in perfection. I envisioned a spiral of just 3s, 4s and 5s. As you can see, the puzzle ended up having two 1s. Ugh!

The 1 near the centre was most unacceptable as I didn’t want to have any givens there to ruin the spiral. The puzzle got a lot of praises, which surprised me (in a good way), since I wasn’t 100% happy with the result. Although during test-solving, I thought the path was quite smooth. As you can see: no twos!
I’m happy people liked it.

300m-400m: Yajilin
I feel there’s a lot you can do with Yajilins and most of Nikoli’s aren’t beautiful and quite bland to solve. I’m very strict with myself when writing Yajilins. The first one was a yacht-shaped one in Puzzle Cruise, followed by the ring of 1s in Puzzle Fusion and now this. The two 2s in the corners are add-ons that luckily didn’t spoil much. I hope you liked the bottom right quadrant about half-way through the intended solving path and how it forces a black cell there without having to guess.

Solutions to Nikoli Hurdles – 2/5

100m-200m: Tentai Show

When I listed possible types I want to include in Nikoli Hurdles, I promised to myself that one had to be a picture-puzzle that would violate the answer keys. I originally thought of Tetsunagi (Connect the Dots), but oh boy is it hard to make on computer.

I’ve solved less than 10 Tentai Shows and never tried making one. This construction feat was also a personal challenge. The one used was actually the second Tentai Show I made. This was the first one:

I would’ve asked:  identify this sport.
Difficult right?
I thought so too, which was why I made another one.
(Give me your best guess in the comments.)

Now, what answer would be appropriate, and internationally-recognized enough, to be the solution? Thinking Japanese, I quickly thought of Pikachu. Even if you haven’t been to Japan, or watched Pokemon, I thought it would’ve been quite difficult not seeing a Pikachu before.

Fearing age bias, my second option was Colonel Sanders of KFC fame. I even came up with a rough dot-to-dot puzzle resulting in the smiling old man we’ve all seen before, I would ask for a 3-letter solution, namely: K, F and C. No matter how much I like their chicken, I just couldn’t resist including the famous yellow mouse in Nikoli Hurdles.

A stream of comments came in after a few days. Some liked the idea, some said it was unfair. I’m left to wonder what would happen had I opted for the KFC puzzle instead.

Solutions to Nikoli Hurdles – 1/5

0m -100m: Suraromu
From past experiences I knew that a Suraromu can only be made hard by enlarging it. I have never quite seen a 10×10 difficult Suraromu. This puzzle has been in my puzzle shed for a while now and it was an attempt to see how hard I can get it to be. The end result turned out moderate to hard and I’m happy that some of the solving path isn’t too clear as most 10×10 Suraromu goes. Give this to someone who hasn’t solve a Suraromu before, and I’m sure this puzzle would pack a little punch.

Nikoli Hurdles Results

We now wrap up Nikoli Hurdles.

After solving 8 puzzles, I asked “how many 2s did you see?”
After running the entire 800m course, you would see 17 occurrences of the number 2. Throughout the 29 days, I received (guess what) 17 correct entries!

This is the list of players who are correct, in order of their submission times:
1. Serkan Yurekli
2. Prasanna Seshadri
3. Ivan Koswara
4. Term Ital
5. Adam Dewberry
6. Jack Bross
7. Alan O Donnell
8. Eva Myers
9. Alan Lemm
10. Maja Gribajcevic
11. Joshua Zucker
12. Scott Handelman
13. Branko Ceranic
14. Neil Zussman
15. Thomas Powell
16. Sanda Reic Tomas
17. Maja Cvenic

Instead of randomly generating a winner, I got the competitors to play Rock Paper Scissors. The order of submissions will determine their seeded spot in a standard knockout tournament. You can read all about seeded single-elimination tournaments here. Special thanks to Challonge.com for this great interface.

I thank all competitors for such a prompt reply. Some interesting statistics:
Paper was the most common selection at 44.71%, followed by Scissors at 35.29% and Rock was least chosen at 25.88%
Although seeding doesn’t reflect anything but placements in the brackets, 3 of the final 4 were from the top 4 seeds!
More bizarre, the final two were the top two seeds!

Competitors, take a deep breath, here are the results:

Congratulations to Prasanna Seshadri of India!
Prasanna will have the 2013 Nikoli Penpa delivered straight to his door.
And with that, Nikoli Hurdles comes to a close.

Thank you everyone that took part. Even if you didn’t submit, thank you for your interest. Full solutions and notes about the competition will follow during the next couple of weeks. I will take that time planning for the next event which I hope will receive the same warm reception that Nikoli Hurdles did.

Here are the eight puzzles for those who didn’t get to see them.

Last Week for Nikoli Hurdles

Nikoli Hurdles will be closing in less than a week. If you have a few metres to go, or haven’t left the starting line – please hurry!
I will give a summary of the competition as soon as it finishes, possibly with a couple of days delay.

…GO!

The track is finally ready!

I went back and checked all of the puzzles and can now declare that it won’t be as easy as I thought. Some puzzle will definitely challenge beginners and provide ample restraint for experts alike. Nonetheless, I’m very satisfied with the quality of the puzzles in Nikoli Hurdles – especially ones near the end.

There is the Answer Keys page I’ve put up so you clear those hurdles correctly. Little reminder about the competition format; Nikoli
Hurdles will last 29 days, starting today, and closing on 12^th March. If no one completes it by then, the prize of the Nikoli Penpa 2013 will go to the player with the most progress. So, a warning will be given a few days before the deadline should this happen. Feel free to e-mail to roygbivpuzzles -at- gmail -dot- com for any specific questions.

The track can be entered via the menu on top of the site. Start at the “START – 0m” and work your way to the finish line in chronological order.

On your marks, get set… GO!

Get Set…

I have added the About Nikoli Hurdles page on the menu (at the top of this site).
Briefly: 8 Nikoli-style puzzles, solve them and you could have the latest Nikoli Penpa sent to you!
It is beginning soon! Have you been warming up?

Also, I’ve fixed a minor error in one of the sudokus in the Dutch Advent Calendar PDF I uploaded a while back. You can see that here. Lots of puzzles happening online lately, I hope you find time for these Nikoli Hurdles and other events that will follow.