I'm taking a guess it will be similar to the Borderless round at last year's WPC

I'm not sure of that. I think that root thingy in the middle signifies that the borders are given. Must be something else. Lets see...

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So, apparently, I'm the author. I must have a divided personality...

Edited by prasanna16391 2012-09-09 1:21 PM

After missing Di and will be missing beginners too as my exams going on
but lucky that it will get over on 16th and i can appear this!! :)
Well i guess the theme could be something like toriodal sudoku types as the name says "Beyond Borders". :)

Well, its a puzzle test, so I'd hope not :P

Yeah i know its puzzle test, by toroidal i meant the clues may cross from right side to left side or from bottom to top again i mean borders will not be on corners or edges that we generally do have,
i guess this is very high imagination. but anyways guessing is going on its ok :p

About the source of some puzzles (the non-Nikoli/variants) -

I got the ideas of Parquet and Regional Akari from Para. You can find one puzzle of each here and here. They are originally ideas of Naoki Inaba, so you'll find some on his site too.

Regional Tapa was taken from Melon's Puzzles here.

Double Back/Star Battle is a hybrid, where I again took the Double Back half of it from MellowMelon's blog. This hybrid is only a slight change from Comet, which was seen recently in an LMI Monthly test. But anyway, I made one "reject" of this type which can be found here.

Maybe a silly question, but: what is the difference between Heyawake and Heyawacky?

Basically that the regions are irregular. Nikoli's version has Rectangular rooms, and uses the white cells restriction with "2 rooms" instead of "2 borders". It was first introduced by motris here as far as I know.

OK. Thx.

Actually that was my second post (the introduction was here with a story about the frontiers of Puzzleland where regular rectangular shapes become more chaotic). But my two names -- the one I used and the one I discarded that now everyone uses -- are where prasanna linked.

One variation on Heyawacky actually allows solvers to exit and then reenter the same room (Serkan has made some Hexagonal Heyawacky puzzles like this I think). But my original formulation which is used on this test is the "no 2 borders crossed in a line" rule.

^

Thanks for the correction. I did the river one after the other 2 long ago so didn't think to check ahead.

Anyway, I just thought I'd post 2 new puzzles that have appeared in connection to this test.

The first one's a Regional Yajilin on the Puzzle Graffiti blog. There are some 4-5 puzzles of this type available on my blog too(they have a separate category) and I also recently contributed one for the UKPC but I thought I'd link the above puzzle since it has been written with the specific title of a Borders & Beyond practice puzzle, and is quite good too.

The second one's a Pentomino Areas Puzzle by my test solver Para. I just solved that one, and liked it, so sharing that here too.

Edited by prasanna16391 2012-09-12 7:30 PM

Thanks for the test; some nice ideas in these.

I am probably going to remember this one for the fact that the smaller/easier puzzles gave me as much trouble as the larger/harder ones...

Nice work,especially yajilin and tapa.The little PAreas wasnt as trivial as i'd ve expected .

Excellent puzzles, even if some of the tiny ones had a lot of bite. Wish I had more time to prepare beforehand though. I spent 5+ minutes solving the Star Battle without recognizing it was a Double Back, and spent time on the Parquet not recognizing the "no loop" constraint. Even with the lost time back from just not knowing what the puzzles were, I don't see beating MellowMelon (and probably some of the solvers to come).

Thanks Prasanna for the great puzzles. I really enjoyed solving these puzzles.

This was definitely not my night.
Started with the small LITS was still ok. After that I thought to have finished the small Heyawacky and while checking the answer I found an area locked by black cells. Solving it again with more care gave me the same outcome. Finally in the third attempt I noticed where I went wrong.
The same sort of mistake in the small Yayilin. I connected the wrong two ends, and that lead (of course) not to a solution. Since I didn't notice where I went wrong, I solved it again, but this time it worked better. Strange enough the big Yajilin didn't give problems.

I love pentominoes, so the next to try was the small puzzle of this kind. But I couldn't get the starting point. I was tired and the frustration level had increased, both not so handy while solving puzzles...
Fortunately the big LITS went well.

I was really looking forward to this test. I had a lot of fun with all the Yajilin and Heyawacky puzzles from Prasanna's blog last week.

Maybe I just picked the wrong puzzles, but I found the ones I like best (the ones that I tried) pretty tough...

Looking forward to solve the remaining puzzles in relax-mode this week!

Richard - To set you at ease, I do think the smaller Heyawacky and the smaller Regional Yajilin(for its size) may have been a bit tougher than most of the rest of the puzzles and to an extent the 26/30 points do suggest that. The Pentomino puzzles are both of similar difficulty and so the almost similar points distribution. I'll give a detailed reply at the end of the test. For now, I just hope you enjoy the rest in "relax-mode" as you call it. :)

Oh and thanks Melon, Anurag, Motris, Rajesh for the compliments.

Edited by prasanna16391 2012-09-17 2:09 AM

Nice test. All the puzzles I solved went very smoothly. Can I see the solutions for the small Double Back/Star Battle? I'm struggling to see where I went wrong.

Just sent you a private message with it. I'll mostly be preparing a solutions booklet soon anyway.

Hey, Finally a good test after long time.
Thanks Prasanna puzzles were really great. :)
They seem to be easy but are not :p
My favourite were country road and pentominos .. will solve remaining ones later ..
but really enjoyed the test. could have solved 2-3 more but its fine.. have to improve others especially regional yajilin which is the puzzle i started with and stuck over there for 10 min and then just left it. :)
Once again thanks to Prasanna and LMI for this beautiful test :)