Logic Masters India announces November 2011 Puzzle Test — Puzzle Fusion

Dates : 19^th and 20^th November

Length : 120 minutes

IB and Submission Link : http://logicmastersindia.com/M201111P/

Author : Tawan Sunathvanichkul

Sample akari should have a lightbulb in the bottom left and the answer should be 301, right?

Edited by zachpuzzle 2011-11-15 6:51 AM

Also, I might be wrong, but in "regional misneweeper" sample, doesn't moving (C1R4, C4R5,C5,R4) to (C2R5, C6R6, C6R2) create an alternate solution

There are several mistakes in IB.

1C: A white dot is missing between R6C6 and R6C7.
3A: A bulb is missing in R6C1. Answer key should be "301".
5C: Multiple solutions
6C: Multiple solutions (R3C7 can be blackened instead of R4C7)
7A: Two solutions

Can we know score distribution before the start of the test?

Sorry about the mistakes in IB. I didn't double check before posting the IB.

Yes, we'll post the points table before the test starts.

Updated IB with points table uploaded

Here is the points table, if you don't want to download the IB again.

1A	Kropki	20		5A	Make Room for Tapa	20
1B	Kakuro	20		5B	Minesweepers	10
1C	Kropkuro	40		5C	Regional Minesweepers	20
2A	Anglers	10		6A	LITS	15
2B	Battleships	15		6B	LITS	15
2C	Fisherman at War	30		6C	LITS2	25
3A	Akari	10		7A	Masyu	10
3B	Nansuke	25		7B	Yajilin	20
3C	Akasuke	40		7C	Majilin	35
4A	Word Search	10		8A	Fillomino	15
4B	Sudoku	10		8B	Futoshiki	20
4C	Searchdoku	35		8C	Greater Than Fillomino	25

Edited by debmohanty 2011-11-16 12:07 PM

So there will no bonus for completing a set, right,
only individual puzzle points and time bonus

Edited by utkaarsh 2011-11-17 7:04 PM

No bonus for completing a set.

In NANSUKE puzzle ,
does the given numbers have to be entered in left to right and top to bottom pattern in the block.
or it can be reversed and used?

Numbers cannot be reversed. They have to be put Left-to-Right or Top-to-Bottom.
I agree that it is not clear in the instructions.

Edited by debmohanty 2011-11-18 7:39 PM

Announcements

1. Puzzle Booklet uploaded. As mentioned in IB, it has 17 pages including a cover page
2. Partial Bonus : Players submitting 24 puzzles with 1 or 2 typos will be given 3 points per minutes saved

In Majilin, if a white circle is blackened, does it behave like a black circle or like a white circle? So, does the path have to make a turn, or go straight?

If any circle is blackened, the loop does not pass through that cell.

So, it is not like some of the Masyu variations we have seen where white circles become black circles.

All point claims made till this point are settled. Refresh score page to see the updates.

Edited by debmohanty 2011-11-19 7:36 PM

Thanks a lot for such a nice set of puzzles...

Nice puzzles. If answer corrections are being taken, I mis-entered my solution to #6a. For the B cell I entered the shape in the region, not the shape in the cell.

Great set of challenging puzzles.
I was very bothered though by having to keep protecting the light gray lettering everywhere so I would not overlook a letter in a sequence. Slowed me down ever so slightly, and was constantly in my head. Not my favored choice of solution method.

Enjoyed the puzzles, as always -- interesting concept (fusing the puzzles). Best wishes, Dave

Edited by davep 2011-11-20 1:11 PM

'some cells (and not circles) will be blackened ' would have been much better.
I like fishermen at war and kropkuro..wonderful combi. but hey,whats common b/w akari and nansuke? Is the akari logic going to help fill in nansuke in
anyway, or viceversa? Or they are independent (that would be dull)..And i cant imagine finding quick openings in LITS square! I have same question about Majilin that i have about akari.Any help in progress?

Edited by anurag 2011-11-20 2:53 PM

Better in what sense?

better in making sense to the contestant.It was confusing.

better in making sense to the contestant.It was confusing.

Hi, thanks for this great test.
I liked the puzzles a lot, although for the first time I had problems with the solution code: I really had to search for the very hiding letters of the alphabet (in Yajilin for example my loop goes once straight over the letter so that it got invisible). And to be able to read the Kakuro-clues I had to install another printer.
Nevertheless a very good test.

Great test Tawan. Your puzzle are really enjoyable, and the idea is very elegant! Thanks for your puzzles!

Really nice test. My only problem is that I solve on computer using paint and stuff, so in the fusion ones I had to use two different tools and keep switching, which put me in a state of confusion throughout the test :P Hopefully I'll get a printer soon...

Beautiful puzzles (the kind of twisted classics I wish the WPC had).

Horrible answer entry mechanisms. I had to look back at the pdf in almost all cases where gray letters were used.

Very nice test!
Can someone send me the entire solution of Searchdoku?

I had the same problem. I thought it was only an issue with my printer, but apparently I wasn't alone.

I only managed to solve 10 puzzles (got stuck on the majilin...) but they were very good. A lot of them combined types that I'm better at with ones I can barely do at all, which was a turnoff for the test because I didn't have time to practise, but with my rate of solving I didn't even get to them.

Good test, thank you.

No more participants at this time. But the score page is not frozen yet. As many players mentioned, answer keys were problematic. So we need some extra time to revisit all wrong submissions. I expect that the complete results will be out in 3 hours from now.

Please check attachment.





Attachments
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SearchDoku.png (80KB - 3 downloads)

You've missed marking the key word BADMINTON which, without E's and not outside the grid, needs to be one of the sudoku diagonals. The all E exterior made for a very interesting puzzle; one of my favorites on this test.

Yes, I missed marking BADMINTON

Tawan has sent me the solution booklet, but this puzzle is missing there. This image is from my solving, and hence the missing line on BADMINTON.

Bit of story there. The original SearchDoku was too cumbersome and less interesting. I was discussing with Tawan to drop the puzzle from the set (the set as a whole looked very difficult to me even otherwise). But then Tawan came up with this very interesting puzzle within couple of hours, and there was no way we were excluding the new one. This one uses both the puzzles (Word Search and Sudoku) nicely. There is a clear logical path as motris shared. One of my favorites along with Anglers and Fishermen at War.

My only concern was (/is) language-neutrality of this puzzle. Just for completeness, the original puzzle used Swiss words.

Detailed results now available at - http://logicmastersindia.com/M201111P/score.asp

motris is one only player to have solved all 24 puzzles and he takes the first position. MellowMelon and xevs both have solved 22, they take the next two positions. The scores are very close after that.

243 players (a whopping 52 from the USA) participated in this test, and 194 players have got non zero scores. Thank you everyone for participating.

Thanks Tawan for an entertaining set of puzzles.

About answer key issues - The most apparent problem was the loop puzzles in Set7. With light grey letters being overwritten by the loop, many players missed couple of letters, especially I and J. As it can be seen from the score page, there are lot of manual overrides for these 3 puzzles.

I don't think the answer key itself was a problem there. We had used it rather successfully in 2010 Decathlon. The marking of the letters were the real culprit.

Phew, Puzzle Fusion is over.
Deb probably hears this after every test but I owe a huge thank to him for running Puzzle Fusion and spreading it across many forums. I was surprised by the number of participants since this was held very shortly after the exhausting WPC/WSC.

I’m happy to see that no puzzles broke, although several did just hours before the starting time. As Deb mentioned, the original Searchdoku had a Maori-named New Zealand Birds theme which made the grid rich in vowels and most placements were done on ‘feel’ than logic. I surprised myself at how better this one worked out.

About the disastrous answer keys, I really didn’t want to use length of line segments in row/column (in Japanese Puzzle Land) since this is very prone to guessers. I agree with Deb that the real culprit here is the faint lettering and how it is badly placed in the centre. Several people asked for claims in the Akari (namely the column 4 light bulb) that we really couldn’t give points for. Of course – that row was chose on purpose.

In all, this has been a great experience for myself and will be a huge step in improving my future in puzzle construction. I thank everyone who took their time in taking this test.

Thanks a lot for the puzzles, I had a lot of fun (and did quite well). There were a number of puzzles I could mention… The Majilin had a great logical solve, using both rule sets and their interactions. LITS2 is an interesting variation, the puzzle worked really well. I remember being happy I chose to do the Kakuro, a type I don't usually enjoy much. Most likely, there's an easier that better solvers would have spotted, but I found the way I broke into that Kakuro very satisfying.

The answer key problems have been mentioned. Probably, small thin black letters in the corners of cells would work a lot better.

One other thing: I felt that points per minute varied extremely between the puzzles. This is certainly in part because I'm better at some types, but I had the impression that even disregarding that, there was a large variance. What do other solvers think?

Cheers
Rob

Thanks Deb! I had illumation about the word badminton only yesterday evening before sleeping! :)

I noticed this some during the test, after thinking I'd sunk way too much time into the Kakuro/Kropki part to finish, but I did other parts much faster to get back to the right pace. Still, my last two puzzles - the Nansuke and the Akasuke felt the hardest of the whole set and took me almost 25 minutes. I'm not surprised those are the puzzles a lot of the 22/24 finished solvers had left to go.

I think this is my breakdown by section based on my answer test timing and knowing I worked some on LITS^2 before skipping and coming back:

Section 1 - 80 points - 22:52 or 3.5 points per minute
Section 2 - 55 points - 10:48 or 5.1 points per minute
Section 3 - 75 points - 25:13 or 3.0 points per minute
Section 4 - 55 points - 16:17 or 3.4 points per minute
Section 5 - 50 points - 7:10 or 6.9 points per minute
Section 6 - 55 points - 12:43 or 4.3 points per minute
Section 7 - 65 points - 11:10 or 5.8 points per minute
Section 8 - 60 points - 11:45 or 5.1 points per minute

I didn't break out specific puzzles and I'm sure the Anglers (48 seconds for 12 points per minute) and Masyu (except for answer entry, also about 1 minute) were my highest value solves but you can see the Tapa/Minesweeper was the easiest section and Akari/Nansuke was the hardest section for me with about 2.3x difference in point value. Because some puzzles rewarded intuition more than logic, having such variance is not particularly unusual although I might have changed the value of some puzzles. Only one solver did the Akasuke (uvo's wrong answer is close though), so I might venture that at least that puzzle was harder than just a 40 given the really low success rate.

Does anyone know the break in for the Akasuke?

Well, next time I´m going to make sure my printer is working properly. Most my puzzles missed a grid. I couldn´t see any of the kropki circles or futoshiki symbols.
I managed to solve enough considering the missing grids. The fisherman at war was really fun and reminded me of the anglers/pentominos puzzle in your other test.
I also really liked the Nansuke opening, but that was as far as I got. I couldn't finish it in the test, I didn't see a way to continue past the opening.

I'm all in favour of Maori-named New Zealand bird themes. Kiwis in particular come to mind...

My intended break-in for Akasuke was that 2003 can only be placed in either of the two right vertical rows. Then 0103 and 1103 needs to be placed in 2 of 3 possible horizontal rows (not the two columns where 2003 could fit since that would make it impossible to fill in 2003) - and there would only be one possible combination to fit the two hanging 3s. From there, the next leap is looking at 0200, 0201 and 0202. At which point the grid would have 2 of 3 places where there's a 020X pre-determined. Afterwards, using simple Akari rules, everything should fall neatly.

After solving the centre, the Nansuke's focus was that all 5-digit numbers start with 5,7 or 9. Also to be noted is that all 5-digit numbers starting with 7 has 8 as their third digit. Knowing this, simple logic is enough to finish Nansuke.

With the Searchdoku, after solving the Wordsearch part of the puzzle, you will notice BADMINTON is missing and since the sudoku grid is surrounded by E's, the BADMINTON (with two Ns) must be placed diagonally. Using crossings from the Wordsearch (especially TEAMMATE), the puzzle simply becomes a sudoku.

The 6 highest rated puzzles were all from the fused types, which is great news to me, because that means the fusion was enjoyed by the solvers.
Thank you once again.

I think the first part of this description is slightly wrong, at least from my solving experience. The either/or on 2003 was also my first step, but then I can't follow up as you say to place the other entries with 3's. There aren't three posssible horizontal rows to take the 0103 and 1103, just two with the second digit 1 impossible in two of the four horizontal choices that can take a trailing 3, and you can't put both of them in these horizontal rows as they share too many squares. Instead the second of 0103/1103 has to be in one of three VERTICAL spots on the left of the grid or in the middle of the grid. I don't think you can even say that one of them has to be horizontal, to be honest, as there are valid arrangements that use the top-left vertical, the middle vertical, and one of the two far right vertical, for all of 0103/1103/2003, only failing when you pack in the rest.

I didn't find any trivial logic to eliminate all these possible placements of either/or pairs, but I did think the easiest situation to experiment with to eliminate one spot was the top-left most vertical entry, which with a horizontal option forces itself to be a 1103 as it only leaves a spot for a 0103 going in just one place. Fortunately for me, this ended up being the correct situation to get to an answer. I've struggled in looking back at it since to prove it is the only one, but satisfying the 2's is indeed the most challenging part. I just don't see what the "next leap" is actually meant to be with them, unless there actually is a good way to get the 1103 and 0103 down as I guessed them to be.

In other words, I think I got a little lucky, and this puzzle probably is the hardest of the set as there is no trivial first deduction.


Edited by motris 2011-11-22 9:28 PM

In terms of issues such as the legibility of text, both for entering solution keys and also the tiny kakuro clues (which I too couldn't read that clearly once printed, even though I used a laser printer), now that there are so many excellent puzzle competitions on LMI might it not be possible to summarise for authors what text sizes and shades of grey "work" and which don't? Also important are page sizes and margins - this test had huge white margins which were unnecessary and made things smaller than they needed to be, and I've also noticed page sizes varying between authors (perhaps Letter versus A4, but I haven't checked to see).

Maybe, when a page is printed without any scaling, there could be a suggested minimum size of clue text and maybe even a minimum size of cell for sudoku-esque puzzles? And page sizes could be chosen so that they are scaled equally when printed on both A4 and Letter? (i.e. pick the minimum of the two sizes in each dimension so that whether you print 'to fit' or 'at original size' you will get a test that prints at a consistent size and is not cropped). In that way tests would generally print with content at the same size no matter where in the world the solver is. It's easy to do this if you're aware of it but possibly something that puzzle authors don't always think about.

Edited by Gareth 2011-11-23 4:04 AM

Can someone tell me how to solve akasuke?
I only find two "0" by "2003" :(

Tawan and Thomas have given some hints a couple of posts earlier.

I had to miss this test, and I'd like to download the booklet. Unfortunately, the [url=http://logicmastersindia.com/lmitests/?test=M201111P]test page[/url] links to the PDF that is still password protected, and the password is not listed on the test page. Could somebody post the password?

Forgot to remove the password after the test. It is removed now.

In any case the password is TantAluM_tungsten and Tawan never told me what it means

A bit weird, but on the periodic table I once deleted Re (Rhenium) an substituted it for An (some random element), leaving Ta (Tantalum), W (Tungsten) and An which spelt out my name and bragged to my friends about how the table contained my name. The capitalized T A M is merely my nickname. :)