Thursday 29 March 2012

TVC XII Practise Part 3

And here is the last part of practise puzzles. Or maybe the first part if you go by the order of the instruction booklet. I'm a bit late as I noticed an error in one of the puzzles and had to rectify it. I think out of these puzzles I like the Compass Tapa the best. The path oriented structure in it works very well. I also like the Twilight Tapa, but I'm finding them hard to construct.

Firstly the Visionary Tapa. I think it worked out well. The double clue structure makes the puzzle always a bit more challeging, but overall it's not too hard. At least once you get past the opening.
Secondly there's Make Room for Tapa. This puzzle is pretty easy. In the test it will most likely be a lot harder if we go by the puzzle that has been in the test before. Some of Thomas' puzzles will be more at that difficulty.
The Twilight Tapa is the hardest in this set. I found some interest number combinations that are semi unique. I used one as the opening here. Semi unique here means that there are 2 ways to colour that both look the same, except the coloured and white cells are switched around.
The Compass Tapa worked out well. It is of medium difficulty. I'm expecting trickier puzzles in the test for this one.
The Wired Tapa is nothing special. It just feels like a lot of the same. I didn't really think I put in much interesting. One part I liked, but I'm not even sure if that is necessary to solve.

The puzzles can be found below.
[After a bunch of edits I hope they are actually all correct now. Sighhhhhhhh.]

Rules for Tapa

1a. Visionary Tapa

Follow regular Tapa rules. Each clue cell has 2 clue types in it. The black clues are normal Tapa clues for the direct neighbours of that cell. The grey clues work as Tapa clues for the secondary neighbours of that cell. The secondary neighbours are all cells that are one unit from the clue cell. Stated otherwise the secondary neighbours are all cells that touch the direct neighbours of that cell.





1b. Make Room for Tapa


Follow regular Tapa rules. Additionally, each blackbordered region contains exactly 5 coloured cells.



2. Twilight Tapa

Follow regular Tapa rules. Additionally, the restriction that clue cells can't be coloured is lifted. Instead when a clue is coloured, the numbers in the clue indicate the segments of white cells around the square, instead of the segments of coloured cells.



3. Compass Tapa

Follow regular Tapa rules. Additionally stars and arrows appear in the grid, which are part of the Tapa Wall. An arrow indicates that it is possible to follow the Tapa Wall in that direction and reach the Star, without using a cell more than once. All cells with an arrow have all possible arrows given.



4. Wired Tapa

In this puzzle the Tapa wall is a wire formed by connecting dots horzontally and vertically. Clues in the grid indicate how many dots are part of the wire. If there is more than one number in the cell, the dots should be seperated by at least one empty segment. No cell has all 4 segments coloured around it.


13 comments:

  1. Having a couple issues... for the Make Room, I get ambiguities in R4C1-2 and R5-10C1. In the Wired, I get a quick contradiction in the top right. The 111 must send a segment to the top right corner, which can only escape by sealing in a vertex to the upper left of the 111. Was the 2 below it perhaps supposed to be a 12?

    The other puzzles were very nice though. Compass had a great aha about the path, and Twilight had a wide variety of new logic.

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    1. And then I offhandedly said its fixed too. Oops. Anyway, the same aha about the Compass path, and got badly stuck in twilight but solved nicely after a restart. Will do the Wired and the Visionary tomorrow, too sleepy for those.

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    2. For the Wired Tapa the 21 in R1C9 should be a 22.

      For the Make Room for tapa, I had already made a flaw, but my fix seems to also be broken. even though it took me a while to notice. Only saw the alternative for the 41 at the 5th go. So that's all on me missing something. The 41 can be a 32 and then there shouldn't be an issue.

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    3. I'm not very happy with these mistakes as it just shows my weaknesses in determining the genre's workings. The Wired Tapa mistake was actually a typo, but when retesting, I noticed my original wasn't actually unique so I fixed it differently. Might cause some issues if I keep thinking something is the only option, while it isn't.

      Not looking good for the competition this way.

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    4. Well I'm not so confident about Wired either. Its definitely one of the last types I'll try. You could look at it another way, fixing these things will help you not making the same errors again.

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    5. Make Room is fixed. Still having issues on the Wired, although I'm significantly farther in so it may be my error (but a second try didn't help). The part circled in green can't connect to the rest. http://mellowmelon.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/para-tapawired.png

      Honestly, I think Wired is one of the types to be the least worried about if you can just wrap your head around it. When constructing my own I struggled to include anything innovative; I don't think there's room for it to be hard.

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    6. Thats exactly the problem, wrapping my head around it :P

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    7. I made another typo copying it. The 11 in R8C10 is supposed to be a 12. Actually, that 2x2 square with the 2,12,12 and 11 was the only interesting thing in the puzzle in my opinion. You can deduce that the left top and right bottom dots can't be used and the right top and left bottom dots have to be used.
      This is what happens when I have to copy 48 clues into a single Tapa puzzle. I am not able to properly check if all clues match my puzzle.

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    8. I actually rechecked the whole puzzle before posting, but I probably went over it in autopilot, where I knew the path had to go a certain way and I didn't noticed it actually messed up one of the clues.

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  2. Is the Visionary correct? I'm getting an excessive number (5?) of non-unique answers near the end, towards the right side. Checked these all multiple times, and can't find any errors in them. Either I'm missing a rule, or there's a problem.

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    1. Are you aure you don't have any clue misrepresented. I've been checking and I don't find the mistake. I didn't find the mistake for Make a Room neither for a while, but I am more sure about this one.

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  3. I still feel highly insecure of my solves... Definitely missing something, but still can't discover the exact problem. I assume this was the intended solution: http://puu.sh/n5Cr. These are the alternate solutions I'm getting: http://puu.sh/n2Ce, http://puu.sh/n2Ck, http://puu.sh/n2Co.

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    1. You are right. I kept using R9C7 can't be part of the grey 3 clue in R8C9, so it has to be empty. That was a wrong deduction as it could be part of the grey 1 clue. I fixed it by changing the black clue in R8C9 to 23 instead of 13. Sorry for all the problems. I don't really know how so many errors can sneak up on me.

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