Very interesting IB. Looking forward to it.

Just wanted to tell, IB contains 09/18/2016 as competition date, but it's actually from 16th-19th.

Yup, you're right, we will change it soon.

first impression; OMG!!

My printer does not like the dashed lines (the cages of the tetrakis square, the dashed lines in the tree and in the yagit etc.

Have you ever faced this issue with dashed lines of Killer or Fillomino in previous contests? If not maybe the issue is the small size of these lines forced in order to fit two puzzles per page. We'll look into it and try to provide an alternative version which works.

This seems like it'll be fun, I'm looking forward to the contest.

One question about rhombitrihexagonal yagit, does it count as a loop if a fence starts and ends at the same spot on the edge? Or does is it only count as a loop if the fence never touches the edge?

I'm looking forward to it too

Your second statement is correct - it only counts as a loop if it never touches the edge.

Hi Paramesis !

I don't understand the following :

Yagit -

Rule : Two fence segments meeting at a vertex cannot form an angle less than 150 degrees, equivalent to a turn of 30 degrees, unless it has a black dot .
Your blog states "The fence must follow the path of a dodecagon, not turning more than 30 degrees at any vertex, unless it has a black dot".What does the latter mean ? Is there any difference ?

Rule : "Black dots indicate vertices where the fence may turn in any direction. It is not required that a fence cross every black dot."What does the latter sentence mean?Does it mean that there is atleast one black dot which is not a part of the fence path or does it mean that there may or may not be black dots which are visited by the fence ?

"Fences may not branch" What does it mean? I see a red dotted line which I assume is also a part of the solution?! If it is, then the fence is branching right ?!

Also are all triangles in the above puzzle equilateral?

Truncated Square Chocona-

Rule : Filled octagons may share an edge, but only if the contiguous area of filled octagons forms a 45° oriented rectangle.
Don't understand the orientation thing.If there are only 2 octagons sharing an edge tilted sideways ,is that a 45° oriented rectangle ?

P.S : I solved all the sudokus from your blog (recently).They are amazing especially the combo sudokus involving 3 variants.I eagerly look forward to more of them.However my experience on your puzzles is quite the opposite.Horrible to say the least.The Rules look too obscure to me .

Yagit

These puzzles are exactly the same type as the ones on the blog. The instructions presented in the IB have been rephrased.

Any black dot may or may not be part of the fence.

A fence in the first solution is shown as a red dotted line to distinguish it from the fences with which it intersects. A fence path may intersect (or overlap) with another fence path, but a fence path cannot "branch", or split into multiple fence paths. "Branching" at any vertex without a black dot is already impossible because of rule 2, so another way to phrase this rule would be to say that black dots cannot be connected to more than two fence segments.

The Yagit puzzles use a Rhombitrihexagonal tiling, in which all triangles are equilateral.

Truncated Square Chocona

Yes, those two octagons would form a 1x2 size rectangle.

I'm glad you enjoyed the sudokus. I self-published an entire book of Anti-Chess Killer Sudoku's in 2010 that I will reformat and release as a free pdf at some point.

I'm sorry to hear your experience with my recent puzzles has been unpleasant. I should probably write the rules earlier in the process instead of saving them for the end.

Hi Paramesis.
I receive a warning message when i try to connect with your website.It says it may be unsafe to continue connecting

Are you trying to connect to http://puzzles.paramesis.com or just paramesis.com? The second is going to become my portfolio website eventually, but only leads to a parking page now, which I just found out my network blocks too.

If the blog is giving you that message than I'm not sure if there's anything I can do. Does it happen with this link? http://puzzlesparamesiscom.wordpress.com/

i have made a copy of the error message I received
If I click on ADVANCED I can continue to the website without any further problems


Edited by forcolin 2016-09-09 6:25 AM






Attachments
----------------
errormsg.JPG (47KB - 2 downloads)

It opens fine for me. Maybe its a browser thing? I use firefox. Anyone else facing this issue?

Does it happen with other sites that use HTTPS? It might be a problem on your end.

Regarding the dashed lines not printing, I made a version with the puzzles scaled up and moved to a separate page. Does this page print any better?

https://puzzlesparamesiscom.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/kaleidoscope...

I uploaded some walkthroughs for example Yagit, Killer Tetrakis Square, and Tree puzzles:

https://puzzlesparamesiscom.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/yagit-instru...
https://puzzlesparamesiscom.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/killer-tetra...
https://puzzlesparamesiscom.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/deltoidal-tr...

Edited by paramesis 2016-09-11 1:54 AM

Problem is on client side (some browser update?). Server certificate is issued for tls.automattic.com (that's why error:ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID) , but in certificate extension Subject Alternative Name it has valid address: puzzles.paramesis.com.

Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree: Perhaps shade the nodes with letters to distinguish them, because I misread a "B" as a "8" while trying the examples.

Thread is restricted now.

Score page (and feedback page) enabled : http://logicmastersindia.com/2016/09P/score.asp

I feel like there will probably be a lot of people who solve every puzzle.

I was so close, but I lost too much time on the 2nd killer tetrakis, and also a lot of time identifying a stupid mistake on the 2nd proximity snake, and couldn't finish the second deltoid tree.

Really really awesome set! I loved the puzzles! I'd love to see more convention-breaking ideas like these nonstandard tessellating grids.

could not manage to even open the kaleidoscope pl help

Thanks a lot for the test, it was very well done. I should have finished, but kept making a stupid mistake on the large Yagit, finally the fourth print-out went through. Also took too long to resolve that right 7 in the hard proximity snake. Trapezoids and the large tree were the only puzzles that felt fast, but I wouldn't be surprised if most solvers stumble somewhere.

My favourite in terms of aesthetics is the Yagit, it's just fun to draw those arcs. (Have you considered presenting this as intersecting circles? I find that prettier, and it would make the rules easier to explain.) In terms of logic, I like the Trapezoids. The Killer also has a lot to offer, it's just that latin squares will never be my favourites.

I made a version with the nodes shaded, but it was too late to replace the PB, sorry.



Thanks Jacob! I have one more collection of puzzles from this summer that I'm going to release as an eBook as soon as I finish testing it. It features an idea borrowed from David Millar applied to one of the puzzle types from this competition.



Sorry to hear that you couldn't open the book. I didn't see the message until your time was up. Were you able to open the IB before the test?



Thanks Rob! I might try to present the Yagit's as intersecting circles in the future. It was one of the first combinations I came up with, but remains the hardest to explain. I knew my set would need to include some kind of killer variant, and Aziz Ate?' excellent Triangular Skyscrapers concept in the USPC practice seemed a natural choice. I'm still a bit exhausted with Sudoku, so I can understand your point about latin squares...there are plenty of other ways to constrain a number placement puzzle.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Trapezoids - 2

I'm catching my breath after I solved Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree 2 with 50 seconds to spare. Figuring out the answer key takes 40 seconds on its own. Doesn't help that I'm also listening to a song that gets paced up near the end.

When I saw the test, I was like, "12 puzzles in 120 minutes? Really?" Turns out that it's not enough. Perhaps it's because the puzzle types are all very new (although Trapezoid seems simple enough that it might have possibly been made before). Perhaps because the puzzles were pretty tough themselves. (I didn't touch the Killer Tetrakis Square puzzles, but since I got stuck when trying to solve the second example, I suppose that was for the better.)

The choice of puzzles was pretty good. Truncated Square Chocona is pretty weird, mostly with the octagon restriction, but that gives interesting puzzles. Trapezoids, as mentioned above, should be simple enough that someone should have made tried it before. I initially wondered why Proximity Snake doesn't use the same grid as Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit, but I suppose that's to give more cells to work with.

The answer keys. Of course. The fact that almost all of them uses the same format (number of cells separated by color change / border) is good, even if some of them becomes awkward. But Deltoidal Hexagonal Tree is awful. One reason is my previous post, where I misread a B as an eight when trying an example. Another reason is because counting the lengths is hard when the branches get twisty. Of course, there's also a reason of why you can't just use the same format as the other puzzles, but that's a minor reason. The issue is mostly about the counting.

For the presentation, there are just minor issues. Borders in Truncated Square Chocona might have been better thicker. Points can be listed next to the puzzle number instead of spread out to the right; I was initially confused of why the small Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit is worth 34 points and not 20. Puzzles might be better to have the same orientation everywhere, instead of having rows in the small hex-based puzzles but columns in the large ones (the grid is tilted 30 degrees). But yeah, mostly minor.

Overall, it's a nice test, if a little on the tough side. And hey, at least it's another test on LMI.

The grids are at different orientations because I originally designed all of the large puzzles vertically. Perhaps I should have kept them that way, but I wanted to keep them the same orientation as on my blog.

Truncated Square Chocona was the first combination of this series that I got to work, so its pretty special to me. I'm glad to see it was one of your favorites as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if Trapezoids already exists on a blog or in a Nikoli book somewhere. I got the idea from Cell-Land (Serurando) by Inaba Naoki.

For Tree, even though the deltoidal trihexagonal tiling has so many straight lines, this was the best way I could find to get an answer string that wouldn't be easy to guess, even though it's time-consuming to count.

The good/bad thing about Proximity Snake is that it, like Slitherlink, could work on any tiling with the same rules.

I didn't mean to critize the Killer type at all! I found the logic in the Killers very interesting (those on your blog in particular, during the contest I didn't really have the time). I just personally tend towards puzzles where I can draw the solution, and tried to put that forward as a justification for preferring the other types.

Looking forward to the extra set.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Killer Tetrakis Square - 1
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Proximity Snake - 1

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

From the perspective of a more ordinary/average puzzle enthusiast, I felt these were FAR too difficult, to the point that I am reconsidering my hobbies. The problem is that even understanding the rules, I have no idea how to solve them. For example, the fence puzzles and killer puzzles, I could not break into even the small ones. The other small puzzles were mostly trial and error for me, and the larger ones were hopelessly out of reach. I rarely felt like I was ever making progress, even on the three I managed to finish. After about 90 minutes, I just gave up and let the clock run out. It was very ambitious creating so many new puzzles and I hope to see more of them, perhaps in a more casual format. The layout was excellent and the complex rules were understandable.

There are already some walkthroughs for the second examples of Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit (I assume that's what you mean by the fence puzzle) and of Killer Tetrakis Square. For Yagit, most of the trick is to draw walls between different symbols, extend walls to reach black points or the edge, and mark edges that can't be walls. For the Killer... well, I didn't try them either (I didn't progress much for the first puzzle), but most of the tricks are based on Killer Sudoku, with occasional deductions from "no identically oriented triangles have the same number" rule.

Thanks, and don't give up! This selection is somewhat more difficult than the introductions on my blog, which you might find to be a more casual environment.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 2

Time bonus currently seems to be calculated at 8 points per minute.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Too few pages / too small grids
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 1
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit - 1

Thanks for the great contest! I liked the variety, especially the nice strategy in Chocona. For me, though, I thought there was too much of a gap between the smaller (easier) and larger (harder) puzzles. I guessed-and-checked a lot on the easier puzzles (Trapezoids and Snake) and barely got to any of the harder puzzles. Maybe that's just me :P

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Too few pages / too small grids
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Trapezoids - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Proximity Snake - 2

This was a nicely constructed set, although it in general caused me more probems than I would have hoped. I didn't really prepare so had to make sure of the rules while solving a lot because I had to make sure of the adjusted rules. I skipped the most troublesome grids at first (Yagit and Tree). The Tree turned out to be my favourite type though. It worked really well with the genre.
I thought the Yagit would cause me the most problems and I proved myself right (unfortunately). There were a lot of rules that made it hard for me to know what to really be looking for. I made an error in the small one, but managed to fix that when I saw a bad deduction in the resolve. But it was a struggle to get through. I gave the larger puzzle a go in the last minutes but couldn't really make any progress. I think I'm still missing some logical tools to get those started. I'll get to it at a later time.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Too few pages / too small grids

Yes, should have been 318.3.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Killer Tetrakis Square - 2

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I'm not sure if these are too hard or just too different. I still don't even understnad the yagit variant.

Congratulations to Endo Ken, Robert Vollmert, and Tomoya Kimura for your incredible solve times. It took me . and thank you so much to everyone who participated. Thank you especially to Prasanna Seshadri, Tiit Vunk, and Deb Mohanty for all your work testing and administrating.

This is certainly not the end of puzzles on non-rectangular grids! There are a lot more ideas in the works and an entire frontier of unexplored tilings. All of these puzzles were designed in several tiny gridded sketchbooks that I made and brought with me on the long bus rides to and from my internship at an architecture firm this summer. Here are two of the four process pages for Truncated Square Chocona 2:



Anne Tyng was an architect and educator who collaborated with Louis Kahn in several projects that explored non-rectangular tilings, including the Yale University Art Gallery, a prospective City Tower for Philadelphia, and early schemes for the Erdman Hall Dormitory and the Trenton Jewish Community Center (pictured below). Tyng was one of many architects in the early 20th century who referenced D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, chapters 7 and 8 of which illustrate cell aggregation and packing.



Paramesis is a portmanteau of parametric mimesis, a phrase I started using in 2013 to describe an intersection between parametric modeling, architecture, and biology, before I knew that a widely accepted term, for what I was thinking about already exists. The outer circle of the logo represents a genuine attempt to devise a puzzle that would have been called "meristem" and played on a randomized voronoi grid. The objective would have had something to do with auxin gradients, perhaps as some kind of Bossa Nova variant. This attempt eluded me because at corners where four or more cells meet, it can be very difficult to determine whether two cells share an edge or a vertex. Some kind of order was needed.

Thank you everyone for your feedback.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit - 1
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Trapezoids - 1