Forum.Gomoku.pl

[sandra113]

Hi there gomoku fans, are you up for a challenge? There's a highly passionate gomoku problem composer in Russia, Gasan Babaev, and he came up with a VCF problem that is deliberately designed to be as hard as possible. Sure, there have been many VCF problems with long solutions, but this particular problem is specifically designed to abound in false leads that will make everyone grind the teeth in despair. On top of that, nasty cuts are waiting for you everywhere, so getting through this convoluted maze of branches is a kind of challenge you've never seen before. That's a whole new level of difficulty.

After you fail to solve the problem in your mind, try to solve it on a real or virtual board by manually making and undoing your moves - you'll most probably fail to accomplish that either. Even the president of the Polish Society of Gomoku, Renju, and Pente, Łukasz Majksner, gave up trying after he spent a huge amount of time making and undoing moves on a virtual board. A young Czech talent, Frantisek Fnukal, sent me what he thought to be a solution, only to get notified by me that one of his fours was actually an overline. He eventually figured out a correct way to a five, but it took him as long as an hour of adding and removing stones on his board.

And there's an icing on the cake: this gomoku problem has at least two different solutions, with one of them being considerably shorter but requiring true creativity. What Frantisek found is the long solution. The short solution was found by a Russian renju star, Dmitry Epifanov, who commented, "Awesome problem! What a subtle way to connect flanks, wow! I wasn't able to solve it on the Kurnik board, so I took a real board and real stones, and it is only then that I succeeded." He didn't say how long he had been trying to solve the problem, but he came up with his solution more than a week after the problem was made available to him.

So what about you? Can you solve this masterpiece by a Russian composer? If so, how many stones of your color does your solution require to build a five? How long does it take for you to find your solution? And what are the coordinates of your winning fork? Leave a comment below if you have anything to tell at all. Gasan will definitely keep an eye on this thread to see whether your problem solving skills are a match to his power of creation.

Here's the link to the Kurnik board with the position: https://www.playok.com/p/...l7e15f4i15l8#77

Good luck and have fun

[zukole]

http://forum.gomoku.pl/viewtopic.php?p=59583#59583