Two questions, two answers
- Details
- Created on Wednesday, 11 May 2011 23:22
- Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 November 2012 18:00
- Written by Vitaly Novikov
Here are the solututions to the two questions Mahjong News, on behalf of Sherlock Holmes and his secretary Vitaly Novikov, asks of our readers.
156 Mahjongs
Question: Please, reconstruct the hands (any discarded tile from any of four hands gives three mahjongs).
Answer. All four players have “Thirteen Orphans” – 13 single Terminals and Honor tiles.
7 Pairs, 14 points
Mrs. Hudson has in her hand 14 tiles and she distinctly sees 14 points.
She made a legal declaration.
Question: What declaration could Mrs. Hudson make?
Answer. Mrs. Hudson played with adapted set. She has in her hand:
and Flower “Plum” and Season “Spring”. All 14 adapted tiles has digit “1”.
So she can make two possible legal declarations – “Kong” or “Flower”.
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".