If I read you right, then, cities MUST have tapa clues - as a square with no tapa clues can have any number of segments around it.

Well true, I guess the cities are clue cells with at least a 1.

The rule is that any segment of the wall touching a city can only be 1 cell long.
From this my question comes. Do all cities have to be connected to eachother? For example, would the following puzzle be allowed?
The question of course can become irrelevant quickly if each city has at least one distance given.








Attachments
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Valid Tapa Tapa.png (12KB - 3 downloads)

Interesting.Such a city can be used as a trick.But I think Serkan wouldnt, in all probability.The test puzzle would most likely show distances involving all cities
(certainly not all pairs though),and also likely have all cities connected.

So far i've solved only Rauno's example. I had some questions about the type too before solving. But, after solving the example i thought every city should have at least a 1 clue. I suppose that Rauno thought same way. So all cities have to be connected like in the example.

Edited by yureklis 2012-03-29 11:10 AM

Wired tapa: Can the wire loop in to itself? This is different from using all four nodes of a cell. I know this is possible,but a bit useful to know in advance so we know that such loops do not exist.

Puzzle Points Group 1a. Visionary Tapa 59 Puzzles 1-2 1b. Make Room For Tapa 104 Puzzles 1-2 2a. Twilight Tapa 25 Puzzles 1-2 2b. Twilight Tapa 83 Puzzles 1-2 3a. Compass Tapa 14 Puzzles 3-4 3b. Compass Tapa 92 Puzzles 3-4 4a. Wired Tapa 33 Puzzles 3-4 4b. Wired Tapa 94 Puzzles 3-4 5a. Broken Tapa 40 Puzzles 5-6 5b. Broken Tapa 71 Puzzles 5-6 6a. Roman Tapa 19 Puzzles 5-6 6b. Roman Tapa 63 Puzzles 5-6 7a. Sweeper Tapa 42 Puzzles 7-8 7b. Sweeper Tapa 163 Puzzles 7-8 8a. Tapa - Like Loop 14 Puzzles 7-8 8b. Tapa - Like Loop 90 Puzzles 7-8 9a. Tapa [Borders] 35 Puzzles 9-10 9b. Tapa [Borders] 144 Puzzles 9-10 10. TAPA TAPA 62 Puzzles 9-10

Announcements Password protected puzzle has 12 pages (including a cover page) Time bonus will be computed after you click "Claim Bonus" Penalty will be given irrespective of correctness of submission Contest Length : 75 minutes Total Points : 1247 Bonus : 13 points per minute saved Grace Period : 5 minutes Penalty : 9 points per minute used (Computed upto seconds)

19 puzzles in 75 minutes. That's going to be challenging. Although I guess I did 50 in an hour at the WPC.

Link to score page - http://logicmastersindia.com/TVC/XII/score.asp

Excellent puzzles. Absolutely loved some of them (Yet to do 2). Thanks for a great 2 months of puzzles Serkan :)

Nice Puzzles. Njoyed a lot. I only knew 6 types to solve . So Kept a target to solve 12 puzzles at least. But was able to do only 10.
But even then i guess it was better than my first two tvcs and worst than 3rd tvc.
My favorite was Compass Tapa and Tapa Borders.

Having struggled with Bram & Palmer's practise puzzles far more here than the previous TVCs, I dreaded this test much more than the last one, but there were some nice puzzles, thanks Serkan.
(And thanks to Bram and Palmer too, for taking the time to create practise puzzles)

Rohan Rao, I told you to either do really good or really bad.. did you do either of those??

Thanks Serkan for the wonderful TVC series. You can make Tapa as popular as Sudoku :)

Thanks to Bram and Palmer for the practise puzzles, they were extremely useful.

@Pras
I tried doing really good. But 70% into the contest I realised it was not possible, and by then, it was too late to do really bad :|

Its never too late. I got a wrong submission during the penalty period because of a one cell error. You're just not good enough when it comes to turning a good performance into a bad one in the space of seconds. Learn from me.

I certainly picked the wrong puzzle to typo :(. Great puzzles again. Thanks for the whole series Serkan.

Now that it looks like I'll be out of the top 20, (I assume MellowMelon will submit by the end of the day,) I'll ask about claiming points:

I submitted during the grace period because I got the answer key wrong on one of the puzzles. Would that 'wrong' answer have been accepted as correct? I don't remember when exactly I submitted, so I can't tell if my penalty on the score page includes this or not. (Note that I submitted two times during the grace period: first to finish one puzzle, and second to correct this answer.)

I'll just round it up by making my 100th post on the forum as this all draws to a close (mainly because I'm fed up of all the "almost there"s that I've managed over the last 2 months).

From a personal POV, its been wonderful to participate fully in the last 2 months. Last year, I was new to everything, I think I gave 2 TVCs and ended up getting a bigger rank than the points scored! So, even though I knew I've obviously improved since, I didn't really know what to expect with Tapa in general on a competitive level. I've fully participated in every way, and minor negatives aside(mostly to do with my own idiocy), I've enjoyed every bit of it.

I'd gotten used to the whole routine at midnight, which Deb knows about. Its already proving a bit difficult to get out of that routine.

100!

I assume you are talking about '8a. Tapa - Like Loop'.
Yes, that 'wrong' answer is on our accepted list. So you would have got full points, even if you hadn't submitted the 'new' answer during grace period.

So, did I lose points for the second submission, even though that submission wouldn't have changed my score? It doesn't really matter, it's not going to affect my placement anyway. Sad face.

I just have to say that the last two months of TVCs were simply awesome, with tons of great puzzles. Huge thanks to Serkan! :D

TVC XII is now over. MellowMelon again wins this with a huge margin.

And with 3 out of 4 perfect scores, MellowMelon wins TVC 2012 handsomely.

Here is the top 10 in TVC 2012.

Id	IX	X	XI	XII	Best 3
MellowMelon	748.2	1000	1000	1000	3000
motris	1000	651.5	840.1	680.9	2521
deu	857.9	643.1	848.1	540.4	2349.1
Para	857.9	721	693.8	530	2272.8
xevs	791	313.2	912.1	544.7	2247.8
Kota	726.2	836.9	635.5	658	2221
tomek_s	720	586.9	826.9	500.7	2133.8
nyuta	681.3	622.4	717	720.8	2119.1
Nikola	745	529.9	686.7	672.8	2104.4
EKBM	574.7	674.7	729.8	685	2089.6

Full list is available, as usual, at http://logicmastersindia.com/TVC/2012.asp

As everyone has been saying, thanks a ton to Serkan for all the awesome Tapa we've had the last two months. I'd be in awe of the amount of time and effort spent by anyone who put on either the TVC series or the 52 CTC puzzles we got this year. Doing both at the same time? Whoa.

I had a lot of favorites on this test, but the hard Compass and hard Borders were probably the king among them. I should also note that I had very low expectations for the Wired Tapa type in general. While I wouldn't say either on the test was my favorite, I was surprised by how much Serkan was able to do with that variations.

Don't have any good explanation for my finish this time besides the fact that the whole run was almost flawless (which was not true of any of 9-11). Losing a couple minutes on the hard Compass by thinking R9C5 had to be shaded was probably the lone hiccup.

A Tale of Two Contests:

First of all, congratulations to Palmer. He showed great performance and became the Tapa Master of 2012. In the last years, I was always wondering how Thomas solved all that puzzles in extremely short times; now I feel the same for Palmer. I didn’t make 19 puzzles to be finished. My aim was to force solvers to follow a strategy. But a guy that solves all puzzles in 66 minutes can only have one strategy: Kill ‘em all! :) Once again I congratulate him for his self-confidence and earning the title by defeating this final cruel round.

The top three of TVC 2012 are:

1. Palmer Mebane (USA),
2. Thomas Snyder (USA),
3. Hideaki Jo (JPN)

I am skipping the statistics for TVC XII :)

The file that contains all variation ideas will soon be updated. So you can still share any ideas with me.

50 days has been completed in CTC. I am as satisfied as you. It was a tiresome experience for me, Deb and Gulce. If Deb hadn’t come up with this brilliant idea and say “Let’s do a classic Tapa contest” no one would be thanking me today. At this very point I should say that I am not doing these on my own, that would be impossible. I am just a guy who makes puzzles. It is not unfamiliar for a puzzle maker to get all the credit, but Deb, Ulrich and Gulce who worked as hard as I did deserve applause. You already know Deb is dead set on this; he works round the clock for puzzles. I cannot get through so many tests without Gulce. And Ulrich was a great help with testing all TVC rounds this year. The puzzles are sometimes flawed before they are ready to be presented to you. It is really annoying to send flawed puzzles to a solver that has been world champion so many times :) I should also thank Roland, he was also a tester of the last round, in spite of his lack of time. And Ulrich stil agreed to test the puzzles even he had flu last week.

With all of the above, I bow respectfully before these people. I am just a puzzle making robot, but the puzzles shape in flesh and bones thanks to these people.

Let me mention my favorite puzzles of TVC XII: Borders (b), Compass (b), Sweeper (a) and TAPA TAPA.

CTC puzzles were made by me and Gulce. Until last night, I had no intention on publishing these puzzles after the contest is over. But I changed my mind and the reason for that was the files Palmer has been publishing in his blog. He has published two puzzle packs, containing tons of puzzles and solving tips; and I think these are amazing works. I thought about it and I decided that CTC puzzles now belong to the puzzle community, not us. The complete file will soon be available for download.

The top three of CTC are:

1. Palmer Mebane (USA),
2. Hideaki Jo (JPN),
3. Nagata Yuta (JPN)

As I stated at the very beginning, the top three solvers will receive a classic Tapa book that I prepared. The book is now being tested; maybe we can display its cover here. I will need the addresses of the top three in a few weeks. And later the book will be available for purchase at Akil Oyunlari blog: http://akil-oyunlari.livejournal.com

Our country is famous for a dessert named “Turkish delight”. It has many types; one of them is called “double roasted”, very delicious. Palmer took a “double roasted” victory by earning both titles. I congratulate and admire him.

That is all I can say for now. Thanks everyone for getting involved in what we did.

Best,

Serkan

Here's an attempt at reanalyzing the TVC scores using a system similar to the CTC. For each test, the top 10% and median 10% scores are computed, just like in the CTC formulas. I'm not sure of a good analogue for the computation of PuPo, and I'm not sure if it's appropriate in this case, so I weighted each test by the same amount. Then the normalized score is equal to 100 * 2^((score - top10%score)/(top10%score - median10%score)). Using this for the normalized scores and the usual "best 3 out of 4" metric, this was the new top 20:


Full XLS spreadsheet: http://mellowmelon.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/lmi-tvc-alt-rankings...

Not too many rank changes here, and the top 3 stayed the same. My main reasoning for considering this was that the system used here seemed a bit sensitive to the top score. People who had their bad day on TVC X or TVC XII seemed to get a lucky break, while people with their best relative performance on those tests didn't have it count as much - reminiscent of motris's complaint about his Samurai solve in the Marathon being his best relative performance yet still getting thrown out as his worst time. Whether the end rankings with this formula make more sense than the old I'm not entirely sure of, but perhaps other people can offer their own views.

Actually, this whole issue of things being sensitive to the top score is something I've felt is a bit of a weakness of the current LMI ratings in general. The stated reason is to give the top scorer appropriate compensation for their performance, but it seems weird to implement this by knocking everyone else's prorated score down. The exponential distribution the CTC introduced, based around the top 10% score instead of the top score only, seems to solve this problem and possibly do a better job of compensating the top scorer, since there is a steep rate of change in the exponential distribution near the top. I admit I haven't thought about all of the relevant issues in their entirety though. Also, if you check the full XLS file you'll realize the formula probably needs some refinements in assigning reasonable ratings to the middle of the rankings or dealing with skipped tests (0 scores).

EDIT: There is a bit of additional discussion on the topic in this post on Para's blog and its comments: http://puzzleparasite.blogspot.com/2012/04/tvc-xii-recap.html

Edited by MellowMelon 2012-04-04 10:22 AM