This time, my performance was poor for me.
In Matchmaker, I made a wrong guess that
Grid 5 cannot be Tapa Filler, because
the center 2 / 1,2,2 clues do not satisfy Tapa rules.
(I completely missed that solutions of Tapa Filler
do not always satisfy Tala rules.)
So, I struggled to find the solution of Grid 2 (Tapa Trimino)
and wasted about 20 minutes.
From scoretable, I guess that a lot of competitors made
similar mistake.....

Congratulations to Florian! As last year's winner, I take this opportunity to transmitte Tapa Master title with best wishes to enjoy it till next year. He may have deserved the title last year, but skipped last and most important test. Also congrats to Zoltan for the last victory.

I'm surprised how well I did matchmaker puzzle. I think that I spent less than 20 minutes for all grids. I started with Tapa Filler and unfortunately, I made a silly mistake (another one) in my first puzzle. Some other variants (arrows, tapamino 2) take too much time.

Serkan, thanks a lot for this four beautiful contests! Tapa flowing through my veins! I wonder what I'll be doing in two weeks? Maybe you should think about a biennial Tapa tournament.

Nikola

2011 Tapa Series is over, many thanks to all participants and LMI.

The top three competitors are as follows:

1. Zoltan Horvath (Hungary) - 14/15 - 76:29
2. Psyho (Poland) - 13/15 - 71:04
3. tarotaro (Japan) - 14/14 - 78:48

Congratulations to Zoltan Horvath! Results can be viewed: http://logicmastersindia.com/TVC/VIII/score.asp

A detailed overview of TVC VIII:

This one happened to be a very hard test by chance. I didn't do this on purpose but I am a human being and can sometimes miss some points :) I would like to say some things about each type.

Previously on TVC: Peers was OK, but Hungarian required some detailed analysis.

Knapp Daneben and Arrows: KD was very easy, starting from top left and ending in top right. Arrows required realising the two black arrows pointing up and down had only one possible connection for the wall.

Roman: First one was easy, depending on regular Tapa rules. Second one required little analysis for the bottom clues. The clue IIIII in bottom right had to be 2-3 due to satisfy the connection for the wall.

Matchmaker: I arranged the second grid in such a way that both Restoration and Trimino seemed possible at first sight. I constructed the whole Matchmaker concept upon this. A huge number of competitors made a wrong assumption as Grid#5 could not be Filler. But the 1-2-2 clues in the middle was given as a starting point for this puzzle, not a clue set that proves the type wrong :) I have used this puzzle type many times in many contests like Jackpot, including this kind of tricks and I was really surprised that most competitors were misguided.

Shape: Medium one, starting point was the 3-3 clue at the left and the N-shaped pentominoes.

Outside: My favourite one in the test. One needed to realise that the last two columns could never be equal to 8, so they had to be 7 and the rest followed decreasingly.

Tapamino: Normally I hate domino puzzles, because they do not contain good logic. I wanted to get over this. I tried to include all possible logic ways in the first grid. The position of 1's were important and since all 1's were used, position of 3's and 4's were important too. And at last it required a counting to complete the puzzle. Some competitors thought this puzzles were "overvalued". I personally do not believe that this was the case here. Because in the second one, there is a counting trick just like the Pentapa in previous contest. If you draw 3x3 squares around the clues except the ones in corners, their sum equals 70 and there is only four cells left outside these squares. So all these cells have to contain 5's since the total amount has to be 90. The value of this puzzle is not 114 points, but I want to appreciate realising this tricks. So I gave points for both puzzles more than they deserved.

Row: This puzzle was hard to prepare with symmetrical clues. I spent 1-2 hours for the example. The starting point was the second row, with a total of seven and a 3 clue whose both sides cannot be blackened. But I couldn't put logical ways for the bottom part of the grid, since the rules of this puzzle is really challenging. After many tries I gave up and the puzzle happened to require some trials for the bottom part. So this was a tough one.

Quad: Most clues were the equivalents of regular Tapa clues for 12 cells instead of 8, so not a hard one.

I will write about the new Tapa Master, some thoughts about the scoring system and the people behind the scene in the following post.

New Tapa Master
Congratulations to Florian Kirch, the Tapa Master of 2011. As last year, I will prepare a special Tapa prize. I am hoping to present it to Florian in WPC 2011 in Hungary. He is the only competitor who managed to finish all finishable contests, this alone shows how much he deserved his title.

Scoring system
When we started this contests last year, there was one main purpose, that was regular participation. Because OAPC website worked with a fixed competition time and that was a difficulty for most competitors. We had to ensure regular participation for determining a Tapa Master properly. So the scoring system was arranged in a way that each week's scores were carried forward decreasingly. This decreasing would prevent huge gaps between competitors, and each competitor had a better chance for succeeding. But this had some side effects, as we experienced. If top players missed a contest, their chance of winning the title was very little. We had to make a decision and made it.

By the end of 2010 series, the winner was not only a good solver, but also a regular participant. So Nikola deserved his title, with performing just the way this scoring system required. This year we offered the contest to LMI in order to make these contests available for everyone, and they were kind to arrange their schedule for this series.

We decided to exclude optimizers this year, because LMI website meant a lot of competitors and checking optimizer answers would be a huge thing here. This new website provided flexible timing, and considering some suggestions we started a "best 3 out of 4" system but I think that was a quick decision, because the conditions of this year were different, compared to last year. If we had continued the system of 2010, it would be better I think. We encountered different issues with applying "best 3 out of 4" system. The four contests had increasing values, so each of them needed to have a different constant. This resulted in the situation that the value of the first contest was lower than expected. The last contests needed to be prepared harder to normalize this effect. So this system proved itself true to be doubted about. For instance, adding time bonuses to this "best 3 out of 4" system is really confusing, since each contest has a different value. This required each contest to have a different time bonus per minute. This would cause ambiguity since one could finish the first contest way too early and earn more points than the winner of the last contest. So the constants would make no sense at all.

For the next year, I'd like to hold the contests under this website again if it will be suitable for LMI. I will work on a different scoring system. Any suggestions on a better scoring system will be appreciated.

Behind the scene
I would like to give my thanks to two people, my wife Gulce and Deb from LMI team, who had great help making this contests possible. If it weren't for them, this year's contests would not exist at all.

Special thanks to everyone who shared their puzzle ideas. I will soon prepare a file including all variations done so far, so in the future it will serve as a guide for new ideas.

And last, thanks to all participants. Hope to see you next year!

Best wishes

Serkan Yurekli

In the Puzzle Jackpot I made the typical mistake, after I learned again the solving of this type. :)
I started the matchmaker with the Tapa Filler, I could eliminate the 1,2,3,4 and 6 grid, and solving the 5th.
I continued with Tapa Islands. In the 1, 2, 6 grid there is a 1 next to the side, what isn't possible in the Tapa Islands. And in the 4 grid there is a 1-1 next to the side. This is again impossible. So the 3rd grid was the Tapa Island.
The 6th grid isn't Tapoa restorain and Tapa trimino. And I know that in 8x8 grid the Star battle has exactly 2 solution. So the 6th grid isn't Tapa Star. and I could solve as Pata.
The 4th grid isn't Tapa restoration this is can be see easily. I tried to solve as Tapa Star, and it was good.
Finally I started to solve the grid 1 and 2 as restoration this is easier variation as Trimino, and I could finish the grid 1.

Serkan, thank you for the good puzzles. The 2nd tapamino is a very nice construction.
I didn't wait a good result, because I got 36 points penalty, my last answer was wrong, I used my eraiser a lot :)

I was aiming to finish everything but the matchmaker in this one, because I can't do those well with speed. I always end up making bad deductions when I don't take enough time on them. When I did it afterwards I made 5 wrong conclusions about the grid matching before I finally got it. So I'm glad I skipped it otherwise I would have had a similar score as to TVC VII. I didn't think it was the worst tactic skipping it in the end as it would have been good for first place if I had succeeded, although I seem to be the only one who went with that approach in the top 10.

Sadly I only realised the hard tapamino opening till after the test, my hunch approach with 3 minutes to go almost got it out though(I figured the 6 would be 3 2's on the right hand side as you probably needed 1's to get past the 4). When I realised afterwards almost every square bordered a clue, it's a really quick solve. Kinda reminded me of the akari Ex form Mellon's puzzle zoo in that manner, staring ages for an opening but once you have it you never run into a problem again.

I also did TVC V this weekend. Too bad I missed it, I would have turned it out in time for full score (excluding possible entry errors, I actually kept them, just couldn't find anywhere that they were written down, so not sure if I might have messed up).

Edited by Para 2011-03-21 11:00 PM

I'd just like to add my thanks to that of everyone else for the fantastic competition as all are. I made the same mistake as most others with the matchmaker grid 5, kicking myself afterwards,

Hi,

This message is related to TVC and Akil Oyunlari magazine. We are presenting "Error" pages in the magazine. This pages show a competitor's broken puzzles from a competition, along with some comments. We want to show what kind of mistakes are being done by competitors. So far we published pictures of broken puzzles from WPC and 24 Hours Championship.

I am writing here to ask for any broken puzzle pictures, if you have them. You can scan or take pictures of pages like these and send to gulce(at)akiloyunlari.com.

Of course this is not limited with TVC contests, feel free to send any puzzles from any competitions, this may also be from national competitions in your own country.

Best,

Serkan