I enjoyed it nevertheless :)

I got this solution but as mentioned it was not accepted:






Attachments
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20Mar.png (11KB - 4 downloads)

Ya I enjoyed it too. Its a pity it won't be counted in them. One of the best IMO. Of course, I had seen once I was about to start at 12.12 that no one had finished yet, so I did it really slowly after a starting risk with T&E just for the possibility of getting an awesome time :P Was fun for the time I did it slowly. Funny how even after changing a digit there was a uniquely solvable puzzle.

Re Prasanna: I'm coming late to the party and assuming that Tablesaw's comment means the server's solution treated R8C8 as a 5, but actually the puzzle as presented (with a 6) is the only one that's unique. With a 5 there, many other solutions exist. That is a pretty nice puzzle too.

You're right on your assumption(according to Deb). As for the multiple solutions, since the solution is treated as a 5, I assumed that to be correct and forming a valid puzzle, and didn't really check it out. Having looked back, I agree my assumption was wrong, and that only the one with a 6 gives a unique solution.

Will there be a 50th puzzle added at the end or will the competition last for 49 puzzles now? I was just wondering as there seems to be a possibility developing that Valezius can catch up to places 2 and 3 as the gap has shortened considerably in the last few days. It might not make a difference but it could. Also I've been closing the gap to place 4 again, but the top 3 change would of course be a bigger development as that's been the same three people for well as long as I've been keeping track.

Yeah, the problem was the recorded solution was wrong. The puzzle itself was valid.
We could have fixed the recorded solution, but by that time 2 players (Psyho and wielki_m) had submitted the wrong solution, which the system flagged as right and (possibly) had left the scene.


We will most likely have 50 puzzles, so the last one appearing on 1st April. But I need to get it confirmed from Serkan. So a concrete answer is pending.


Edited by debmohanty 2012-03-20 1:44 PM

With this one day break we will solve the 50th puzzle on 30th of March.
And the TVC XII will finish on 2nd of April.
Is this accurate?

Seeing that today is day number 39, I think 50 will come on 1st April.

Okey, I see.

I took a screenshot of the answer that was accepted. After the correct answer wasn't accepted, I tried redoing it to see if I missed something. Then I made the "correct" mistake.

I deleted the picture. Please do not share information about the current puzzle in public...

Use the Private message function.


(I sent your picture to Deb)

Edited by Valezius 2012-03-22 3:57 AM

Sorry if I was not clear, but that was not a screenshot of the current puzzle. It was the "correct" answer to the now-canceled, but much talked about puzzle from March 20.

This is to confirm that a 50th puzzle will be added at the end.

What does a "0" clue mean in standard tapa??? (23 Mar puzzle) Does it constrain anything (I don't see that it can in today's layout), or just add confusion?

In a clue with multiple numbers 0 can be ignored.

There's been a lot of hard puzzles at the end. It's causing a lot of big point jumps.

Yes, I just want to say that I'm a bit disappointed in classic tapa because there is no standard 10x10 puzzle which is not solved in less than two minutes by best players. If you want to keep 120 seconds limit unbroken, you must enlarge the grid size. I'm not sure that would be the case with any other puzzle type, except maybe ABC connection puzzle. Such contests are fun, but it seems they discover the real truth about the puzzle types.

Nikola

Well February 18th had a top 10% average of over 2 minutes, so that one comes close.

:)
Real truth is the function of "undo" button. Providing this button was a mistake (Deb didn't want to use it but i insisted) because solving with this button does not truly represent the action of Tapa solving. I made a lot of hard puzzles but this button makes everything so easy, it is so easy to make many trials and erase them.

I think what is discovered is how well a solver uses the undo button. It is not much related with Tapa.

Wow - somehow I managed to completely overlook the fact that there is an undo button. Could have saved me a lot of time! :p

With 5 days to go, its an interesting fight between 2nd/3rd/4th/5th/6th/7th :-)

I'm yet to use the undo button myself but thats more to do with the fact that I just prefer a full clear and start over when I go wrong :P

I think the undo button is necessary though. Mis-clicks are always possible. The color changes are not as necessary IMO.

As we've found the unfortunate fact about doing Tapa of this size online is that guessing becomes a preferred strategy in many cases. I've kind of been worried that with the ability to make other solves viewable by anyone for this particular contest that it will give the illusion of "guessing is how good solvers get good times". That might be true for 10 by 10 Tapa, but absolutely not in general. Even for the 12 by 12 sizes I avoid just guessing my way through it, at least too early, because there's too large a search space, and my better performances on those have usually been with logic. My total inability to figure out what was going on for March 25th was a notable exception to that, and I did have to rely on luck/"tapa sense" there. I think there's a sweet spot for the difficulty of the larger puzzles that makes them hard but still preferable to do with logic from a speed-solving perspective. March 23rd was dead on in my opinion, and March 25th overshot it a bit.

That said, I don't think it's necessarily the Undo button itself that harms things. I typically forget about it and waste time erasing things manually when a guess screws up, which is still faster than erasing on paper, and online it doesn't leave distracting stray marks too.

Also, I have been going back after the days I bifurcate and solving these logically. Almost every puzzle is fantastically designed, even if it ends up that guessing is the fastest way to get through them, so it's more just a issue with this being a contest than a matter of puzzle quality. However there have been a few days where I've had trouble getting a logical solution without minor T&E. The ones that come to mind are February 25th, March 22nd, and March 25th.