The Return of Sherlock Holmes
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- Created on Thursday, 29 March 2012 21:37
Beginning this week, Sherlock Holmes will be back in Mahjong News to solve his mahjong mysteries…
Every mahjong lover in the world is invited to help the great detective in resolving his problems. Not in matters of life and death, but in cases as Dr. Watson and the Nine Gates or The Secret of the Thirteen Orphans.From Monday on, author Vitaly Novikov will throw the gauntlet. Do you dare picking it up?
Here is a survey of the mysteries - and solutions - of last year. The coming months, a new series will be published in Mahjong News. You can help solving them by filling in the comment form below the text.
To prevent premature solutions, publication of the ‘right answer’ will be postponed for a maximum of seven days. So every visitor of Mahjong News can do his best to try and fiund the solution.
Enjoy!
From Monday, April 2nd on…
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".