Last tournament (for next sweeping generations T2 of S7 ) forced me to raise this discussion. As you probably noticed some incredibly good times were achieved (sub 0.25). But there were almost no skills required, proper "tactics" and bit of luck was everything you needed  .

How can be such low time achieved? It´s simple dear Watson...

ttlsquares!/((ttlsquares-mines)!*mines!)=15!/(7!*8!)=6435 possible mine arrangements. (Beginner has 94143280 possible arrangements)

With such low number it is worth waiting for fast solvable specific board. I tried to count it and with 60-80 boards played per minute (playing EVERY board right after generating as if it was the desired one) only 80-100 minutes (it´s probability, we all know it´s only theory ) is required until your board appears. It´s boring but with a bit of luck you get sub 0.25 soon...

As I said this "tactics" does not require almost any skills, so it probably should be prevented. Because it is not game bug, this problem should be discussed in community. My suggestion is to restrict tournament boards with less than 100.000 mine arrangements.

What do you think about it?

Hi guys, at the moment I'm addicted once more to another computer game: Shisen-Sho.

http://dvalot.free.fr/games.htm

Although my brother beat me in both levels small and medium yesterday, I think our scores are already pretty good. Some more competition would be very nice, and I wonder what times you could get. There is no highscore list until now, but please test it out and tell me how it works out. Have fun, it's a real cool game.

Roli

@Doug Mair: I´m afraid there´s no such page. I can give you all the basic information I know:

1) Keys: F1-help (not too useful ) F2 new game of level you have selected, F3 new beginner game, F4 new intermediate game, F5 new expert game, F9 turn marks "?" on/off

2) 1 click board: You can click and drag, you don´t have to click all squares. E.g. you see empty row, then click on edge square and drag the cursor to the opposite edge with left button pressed (same principle is applied when flagging whole row, only with right button). And there is 9 safe squares on beginner level

3) If you use all flags you have in top left counter (for beginner level 27) then yellow smiley turns blue. When you press blue smiley, all unflagged fields are revealed. If you placed all flags correctly, the board is solved.

4) You already know you can click side numbers.

That´s all, no other key is necessary.

Happy sweeping

Hmmmmm.... I don´t remember I got same board twice and unfortunately I only take screenshots of good games so my database is not too big... But if we realize that probability for intermediate is 1:1,98.10²⁷, it sounds to me like not very good random number generator is used or you were extremely lucky . Hope it´s  the second possibility, because I don´t like board scumming and this could lead somebody to generate the same board over and over again  . Maybe you could mail this directly to Yariv (because he is really busy and I doubt he reads forums).

@Luca: this is Yariv´s reply when I asked him the same thing 

"The reason the site went down was because the rankings were creating too many SQL requests (building the tables is more complicated than it looks!), so I had to temporarily disable them to get the site back up. I will put them back of course, but I have to restructure parts of the database to reduce the number of requests, so it will take a bit of time. I'll try to do it as soon as possible, although I don't have much free time at the moment! Anyway, the rankings will be back soon - in the mean time the tournaments seem to be doing well too... please send any board requests if you have any, as we are getting quite a lot of repeats!"

Uh, uh, somebody really tried Shisen-Sho. Cool. Well, I suppose you meant 0.53 MIN? instead of 0.53 s? Okay, then you're drawing near. First difficult step was getting below 1 min. Meantime I managed  38 s for beginner and somewhat below 2 min for medium. I usually don't play the big one. Keep up the chase. And maybe some others as well? Greetings, Roli.

P.S.: I like the actual tournament. It's so much intermediate style!

@Roland: Grats for your 2nd 11s!!!

Shisen: Hm, I can choose 5 sizes for Shisen.
Can you give me a direct download link so I can be sure I use same version as you do?
Also 38s seem a bit too fast for the easy level I play. It wasn't so easy to get the 53s on the easy level I play.

I don't know which version I have. I downoloaded it from the link Roland sent about one month ago.
By the way I achieved a 36 in beginner and 91s in medium