This sounds exciting. For planning purposes, can you give an idea of how long you expect it to take to solve this -- something like "top players will finish in under an hour", or "this is roughly 3 times as long as a typical round of the Puzzle Ramayan", etc. -- so that those of us who need to plan around a life/work schedule can figure out when to start this test?

I don't have a ton of data points, but I would guess that the fastest solves would be around 2-3 hours.

Ok thanks... not a contest to be undertaken lightly by those with small children at home at a time when most schools are closed, then... We'll see if I'm able to participate competitively or will just be doing it in several installments in my spare time away from kids...

A couple clarifications/rule subtleties that I'd like to highlight here:

Country Road: for the nonadjacency clause, empty cells in different zones don't matter.
Balance Loop and Masyu: loop segments in other zones still count towards satisfying these clues.
Palindrome: the palindrome restriction is per room visit, not per zone visit.
Persistence of Memory: the same-shape restriction applies across the whole zone.

Edited by ostroffj 2020-04-21 4:38 AM

I am more optimistic and expect the fastest time to be less than one hour. My estimate for top solvers would be about 50% of the time estimated by the Author, which means about 1-1.5 hours.

A question about the circle rules: the example of Balance loop (rules) is also valid for Masyu rules and Palindrome Pearls rules; is this allowed in the puzzle? I mean, in each zone, is it true that only one circle rule applies or is it possible that multiple circle rules apply but the rules can be assigned to each zone unambiguously?

Edited by blivet 2020-04-25 8:43 PM

It might be true that multiple circle rules could apply in a particular zone, but there's a unique way to assign the rules to the zones.

Wow, this was a rollercoaster. I'm pretty content to have finished in just under 5 hours, given that approximately 2-3 of them were spent doing other things after having given up on the puzzle due to failing to notice the first break-in point. It was arduous, and I may have almost given up a second time due to a clumsy error (though fortunately one that could be diagnosed without destroying my progress), but all in all a very satisfying thing to finish. Well done, Jonah!

Well that was certainly something! Very impressive construction. Well done.

If I could make one suggestion, it would be to impose a more significant penalty than 2 minutes for incorrect entries. I certainly could have saved much analysis time by trying some different entries in the matchmaker grid.

Good suggestion. We had thought of this before the contest. But finally let it remain at 2 minutes (like earlier fun contests), even if someone took undue advantage. But that would still need more than a fair amount of solving. And this being a fun contest, the ranking does not matter much.

What a puzzle! I was bifurcating for a couple of hours in there, and then realized that I had the path forward staring me in the face. Still, I'm happy with my time of right around 5 hours.

What a puzzle! At first I thought it would take me a year - perhaps - to successfully resolve it. It took me a long time to find a starting point. And finally ... Well, my time is ridiculous, but I am proud to have won it on time. Well done for the design.

Unforgettable experience, Sir Jonah. :)) Yours sincerely, PK.

New to the site. Still figuring out how to participate. Can anybody help with the password? Clicking on Timing even after being logged in does not show any password option. Please help.

Thanks to all 115 participants from 28 countries and Congratulations to all 46 finishers. USA (19), France (17) and Japan (11) had the most participants.

Although this was not a competitive test, Congratulations to Prasanna Seshadri, Anne Limoges and James McGowan for finishing in ~1.5 hours, the best in this test. Also special mention for Ruben Gafencu for being patient while submitting answers.

Thanks to the author Jonah Ostroff for creating this masterpiece!

Wonderful puzzle. It looks like it's impenetrable, but about 20-30 minutes in I found the break-in and I actually started filling the grid. I imagine this is a similar experience to many people doing my fun test of a 16x16 Poset Futoshiki from 6 years ago. It's largely logical; I had to bifurcate a bit in the middle of the solve, but I heard from others (including the author himself) that it's not really necessary and I missed a simpler solve path by focusing on a different portion of the puzzle.

Thanks for the comments, and for participating in this experiment! Thanks also to Rakesh for letting me break the rules a little with the IB, and to edderiofer and TheGreatEscaper for testing. And congrats to the top finishers for being way faster than I expected!

A few additional credits: the idea for this originated last summer when brainstorming for the We are Puzzlers Club tests. phenomist suggested a matchmaker where one of the grids was the matchmaker grid itself, and while we didn't end up using it then, I couldn't get the idea of a meta-matchmaker out of my head. Back in January I got around to putting this together, and edderiofer came up with the idea of presenting it as a "normal" puzzle in the IB and springing the twist after the competition started.

Genre inspirations: most of the room rule choices were inspired by Bram de Laat's Four-Colour Loop, one of my all-time favorite chimera puzzles. Detour is by wen (also featured in last year's WAPC tests), and Variety was invented for this contest because I couldn't think of any other rooms-and-numbers loop genres. And for circle clues, I found it helpful to get ideas by staring at TheGreatEscaper's Ludicrous Loop. Finally, Palindrome Pearls was invented because the circle clue placement was ridiculously constrained, so I wanted a genre where I could add room borders to fix contradictions. Not sure it's a viable genre on its own though.

Edited by ostroffj 2020-04-30 12:41 AM

This puzzle was a masterpiece! Big thanks for the tremendous effort of preparing it. I completed it in more or less 5 hours. I started it today at ~15:20, completed at ~20:10, but got a mistake in Row C only. Took me more than 20 minutes to figure out where it is, but it was easy to fix it, so I got the correct answer 7 minutes after the contest ended xD.

That puzzle was an awesome experience, thank you Jonah !
I honestly can't begin to comprehend how such a puzzle can be created, it is very impressive.

The feelings when I opened the pdf, saw the matchmaker grid and thought "uh, where is the puzzle ?", then read the first line of the second page... big emotional whiplash :D
(I don't know if some people expected the twist beforehand, but I was not one of them !)

The entry point was not trivial (constraint between Country, and ? clue limited to 6) but I suppose I had a good intuition on that day !
After that the puzzle solved quite smoothly.
I had a bit of a difficult moment in the C zone, luckily never destroying my progress in other parts ; and had to use trial and error to join several loop parts around the junction of ABDE regions in the end (I guess I started to be tired and didn't notice something logical with the masyu rule ?).

I must say, after all that I was quite surprised to see it had only taken me 90 minutes, it felt like a longer journey !

Solution Booklet.

I got another solution, could anyone check it, please? It's only different in the middle sector, starting in row 8 (key C): 213312; row 9: 11211222; row 10: 112341 and the ice-barn-clues in row 8 and 10 are visited twice. Thx

Edited by oe2 2020-04-30 9:16 PM

The ice barn clue in row 10 could not be visited twice, as the horizontal crossing would violate the Liar restriction, as it would be a room entry of length 1.

Oh yeah, I got exactly the same mistake... Noticing that this particular ice barn crossing is forbidden by liar rule was pretty tricky to me, that was the mistake I was searching 20 minutes for and it would definitely simplify the process of solving had I noticed it earlier.

Thanks