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 :)

Borders & Beyond is now over. 205 players participated.

Congratulations to MellowMelon, motris, and deu for taking the top 3 places. Melon was on another level with these puzzles. I had targeted the top players requiring 100+ minutes and that was indeed the time taken by other top players. So Melon finishing it that fast, even for him is above expectations.

Among Indians, Swaroop did well after a few off-performances in the previous tests as he said, and leads the Indian scores for the first time. Amit takes the second spot and Rajesh, returning to participation after a 2 month break, takes 3rd.

I'd like to again thank my test solvers Bram and Murat. They've both authored LMI tests in the past and at times their experience really helped. There have been a few comments about the smaller puzzles being harder than expected, and to an extent I agree. I think the smaller ones usually had some little area of difficult logic in them which took time to see, whereas the bigger ones were mostly of a medium difficulty with steady solves. On a relative basis, I think the points distribution was pretty accurate.

About the puzzles themselves, I won't go into too much detail now. A solution booklet will be uploaded shortly in which I plan to write a bit about the ideas behind the puzzles too. I see that the big Regional Tapa is the highest rated so far. My personal favorite is the big Country Road simply because from an author's perspective it was nice to get that little feature working (for those who haven't figured it out yet, that'll be in the solution booklet too).

Thank you all for participating :) Its been quite a nice experience authoring an LMI test for the first time.

Nice puzzles, thanks! Felt like a challenging lot to me. I often reached contradictions after some unrealized logic error. I look forward to the solution booklet.

Really enjoyed this as well. Couldn't get very far on some of the puzzle types I had never seen before, but that didn't stop me from trying. :) One thing that confused me was the entry of "0" as the digit for a row with ten shaded cells. I redid the puzzle four or so times figuring that "10" can't possibly be a valid digit, but couldn't come up with an alternate solution, so I just guessed that maybe "0" was what was wanted. Is there some place that mentioned that possibility that I missed? Or did I solve the puzzle wrong and get lucky with the entry happening to match the actual right answer?

On the test page itself (http://logicmastersindia.com/M201209P/) it is mentioned in that white box. I apologize for not having placed that in the Instruction booklet. But for the future, I think you can make a note to look there too as thats where the last minute small clarifications usually get added. :)

Sure enough, failed to look there. Okay, I feel better now. :)

Hm, seems like I need some new glasses. When I started the test, somehow I was sure that it was not considered a monthly test and also couldnt find the "Opt out"-checkbox to not consider it for the puzzle rating. Dont know if I would have started it with that in mind, because I was not prepared at all and just had to fill some spare time. Anyway, all went good, so it doesnt matter.

Nice puzzles, and Im also looking forward to the solution booklet this time, because my solution of the big Akari seems to be non-unique. (Row 8, either column 9 or 10 contains a light bulb).

So as promised, there is now a solution booklet available. Personally I like to read about authors' views and all too, so for anyone who likes that, there is my own thoughts about each set of puzzles at the bottom of the page.

Download link.

View link.