Tag Archives: tapa

Florian

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Most of you have probably hear the sad news: Florian Kirch passed away last week. I can’t claim to have known him well; a little better after preparing for and competing at the WPC this year with him. That was a great experience, I’m glad I had the opportunity. The whole thing is quite a shock, more so since he seemed full of plans: He’s behind the first German youth sudoku championship that is being held this year, and was actively working towards a WPC hosted in Germany, besides a variety of activities in other fields.

If you’d like to solve some of the puzzles he constructed, I’ve collected what I was able to find. I’d be happy to extend the list. The 2015 Logic Masters certainly stands out, my favourite of his rounds there being “Vorsicht klebrig”, a set of Tapa, Fillomino and Slitherlink puzzles that had to be matched to normal, cylindrical and Klein bottle topologies.

I’ll close by reposting a puzzle dedicated to Florian’s memory that I first published here on the portal.

tapaklein

Rules Glue the grid to form a Klein bottle, by identifying one pair of opposing edges directly, the other pair after flipping. Then solve as an ordinary Tapa.

Puzzle 70: Different Tapa

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I’m meaning to write up a report on the recently finished 24th WPC. No official results yet, but Ken Endo won the individual competition before Ulrich Voigt and Palmer Mebane, and we (Florian, Philipp, Ulrich and I) took gold with the team in front of Japan, Germany B (inofficial) and USA.

Instead, here’s a puzzle I made in preparation for round 9, which consisted of various puzzles built around the idea of marking several areas that had to be filled differently.

tapa-different

Rules Solve as a standard Tapa. Additionally, each gray 2-by-2 square must be shaded differently. E.g., no two gray squares can have only the top left corner shaded.

There are 15 gray squares, the different shades of gray are only there to make it possible to tell the squares apart.

Edit Here’s an alternate rendering, due to edderiofer.

tapa-different-borders