Puzzle Structures ?2 Rotator

Cihan Altay is a Turkish puzzlemaker and the creator of competitions like PQRST, PDT and Otuzoyun website. Rotator is a puzzle structure, based on the font which was also created by Cihan. It involves two uses of the same grid, one regular and one upside down, resulting in a grid with different clues. I think this is a very simple, yet brilliant idea. As having designed some of these puzzles, I know it is really hard to prepare, especially with symmetrical clues.

I’ve known Cihan for about 8 years, and he is a type of person that always “thinks outside the box”. Even in the simplest things, he approaches them in a different manner and asks unusual questions. He traces those questions and seeks for answers, and those answers generally lead to this kind of different structures. So he fancies puzzles involving mirrors, rotations, foldings, transparent grids, optimizers, etc..

He developed the Rotator structure in 2006-2007. I think it was first used in 8th 24 HPC internationally. He used the structure in Tapa Rotator of TVC III, where all puzzles were prepared by him. He has also used the font in USPC 2011 puzzle Flash Cards, and the same puzzle showed up as Math Flip by Erich Friedman this year.

You can find another example of Rotator structure in LMI MAYnipulation test by Murat Can Tonta. My creation of Rotator structure is combining it with Matchmaker, which I first prepared for WPC 2010 in Poland.