From last year we are having regular Bangalore puzzle meets. There are few meets for which I have written earlier and one can read about these meeting here.
August 2016 Bangalore Puzzle Meet took place on 28th August at Science in Box. Following were the participants who joined this meeting.
 |
| Left to Right: Vishal, Evanthe, Rajesh Kumar, Karthik Sai Burra, Amit, Prasanna, Gaurav, Shaheer Rahman and Tharun |
Agenda of the meeting was Introduction to one Sudoku type and Introduction to one puzzle type along with playing the Team round. Board games was also part of agenda which we planned that we will be starting it before the puzzle meet.
Around 2pm most of the participants reached the venue. It means that everyone was interested in playing board games. However Amit got delayed for the meeting and we started with Introduction of Sudoku type round. Anti Knight Sudoku was this meetings' Sudoku type. Puzzles given for this type were very tough and each one of us was taking lot of time to put even a single digit. First four puzzles most of us were able to solve but at the end everyone got stuck at very hard Sudoku by Rishi Puri. This particular Sudoku required advanced Sudoku solving techniques. I was able to put few digits and then took help of Amit to proceed little bit further on this puzzle. However after that we both were stuck for a long time and could not proceed. Then Gaurav helped us to complete this puzzle with very innovative Sudoku solving techniques which required lot of chaining and pairing of numbers. There was lot of learning from this exercise. I helped Shaheer to solve one of the Anti Knight Sudoku. At the end everyone learned from this. Inspired from this, I have later even created two Anti Knight Sudoku puzzles which I will be publishing on this blog soon.
Next in the agenda was Introduction to Puzzle type and this puzzle type was Masyu. There were many newcomers in the meeting. Prasanna explained the rules for this puzzle type and helped newcomers to understand this puzzle type. Most of the puzzles given for Masyu were easy and everyone completed many of the puzzle from the given set.
Next was Team round which was very good team building exercise. Two team get formed. Team 1 contained Prasanna, Gaurav, Shaheer and Vishal. Team 2 contained Rajesh, Amit, Tharun and Karthik, Evanthe who is 11 year old took break from solving as it was getting very tough for her. It was team round of five Sudoku puzzles which were interlinked. This interlinking of puzzles were done with common alphabets among these different Sudoku puzzles. It means that many puzzle contained some alphabets in the cells and these alphabets will represent the same number across different Sudoku puzzles. I will not mention the Sudoku types here as this puzzle was part of one of the World Sudoku Championship. This was very good learning experience as everyone has to interact with each other while solving its own assigned Sudoku. At the end Team 1 lead by Prasanna could complete all the puzzles and our team messed up with one of the Sudoku puzzle and hence another interlinked puzzles could not be completed. Everyone enjoyed working as a team and learned a lot from this Team round.
Next in the Agenda was Board Games which could not be executed as at was already 6pm and lot of us has to travel back home.
Some of points to ponder after this meeting is as below
1. Team rounds are very enjoyable and should be always included in next meetings.
2. Anti Knight Sudoku puzzles were very tough. It will be great if some easy puzzle could also be included for the newcomers in the meeting.
3. Group solving a very tough puzzle helps a lot to learn many new techniques.
4. Many of us were interested very much in playing board games. May be in the next meeting we can start with the board games.
5. Venue for the meeting looks good. However for the people who are coming first time, it looks tough to locate the venue.
Please do give us feedback in the comments section on how we can improve these meetings.
No comments: