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Welcome to ‘Sherlock Holmes and Mahjong’
- Details
- Created on Thursday, 31 March 2011 20:57
- Last Updated on Wednesday, 13 February 2013 22:19
- Written by Vitaly Novikov
Who is Vitaly Novikov, the Russian mahjong player who is fascinated so much by Sherlock Holmes? Let's have him introduced in his own words.
Vitaly Novikov: “When I was five years old, my dad introduced to me game of checkers. Since then whole my life is devoted to various intellectual games, especially exotic ones – not even merely playing but also analyzing rules sets and constructing new versions. The other aspect of interest to games is organizing competitions, keeping ratings etc. At the age of 18 I organized an 8-round tournament for 34 players for the Japanese game of Renju. When I was student in mid-1980’s I won the Cup of Moscow in two different games: Renju and Contract Bridge.
“I encounted the game of Mahjong back in 2003, that was riichi rules set. My first games were surely against computer, primarily, because there were no players around. In 2004 I started to play MCR -- very interesting and challenging rules set. In 2005 after compiling some analytical research on mahjong – first one was “Complete One-Suit Draw Analysis” – I have decided to start my site "Analytical Articles on Mah-Jong" (http://www.mahjong-co.narod.ru/).
“When studying bridge, I found the whole world of books and articles covering aspects of the game and written by many authors. The best format of such articles covers theory in a form of problems with touch of humor. Looking at the game of mahjong, I found total absence of such “problems” genre. Since I am fan of Mr. Sherlock Holmes the solution instantly came to my mind -- short stories with mahjong problems would be featuring Holmes & Co. Welcome to series ‘Sherlock Holmes and Mahjong’!”
Vitaly Novikov
Years of playing mahjong: MCR since 2004, first rules set to read -- riichi back to 2003.
Website: Analytical Articles on Mah-Jong
Spheres of interests: intellectual games in general, statistics & analysis, Rules/competitions regulations
MJ-servers and nick: ComboRus at MahJongTime
Country: Russia
Age: 44 y.o.
Best win: not yet so far, mahjong set at some MJT tournament.
The First Mysteries
And now, try his first Sherlock Holmes and Mahjong Mysteries…
Comments (2)
1Monday, 04 April 2011 10:37
Sushila Singh
2Thursday, 07 April 2011 07:22
Mark Chizhenok
This guy on the image, with the stick, reminds me the editor of MahjongNews.com... Auto-portrait?)))
It is difficult to judge the difficulty of problems, but some did take me some time to solve.
I especially enjoyed the '32nd of December' and its fourth question.
Thanks to Vitaly for the problems, to Martin for hosting the "venue" and congrats to Sylvain and Scott for their success.
A: two kongs of the same suit (i.e. 8 one-suit tiles) and a kong of wind
So... winds are now suit tiles?
And they are in every suit?
Wow!
Looks like I've misunderstood the question and it was actually an easy one!
Was it because I was the only one to answer the question within the allotted time?
Just curious.
Thanks.
At first, it looks like each player had three pure melded kongs, two of them separated by two numbers (e.g. 1 and 4), and that their left-side neighbour is waiting for these two said kongs with a ryanmen (e.g. _23_).
But it turns out there are not enough tiles for that.
So, here's the trick:
Watson had: melded: 1111m 4444m 5555m, concealed: 23s EE.
Lestrade had: melded: 1111s 4444s 5555s, concealed: 23p SS.
Holmes had: melded: 1111p 4444p 5555p, concealed: 78m WW.
Mrs. Hudson had: melded: 6666m 9999m, concealed: RRRR(concealed kong) 23m NN, and erronously melded as flowers: 2223m.
It certainly "cut off all conceivable scenarios".