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Who designed the page?

Oh, dear... I wonder how big they are

Nikola

Rohan Rao - 2012-01-12 5:25 PM

Who designed the page?

David designed the logo and the banner.

Nikola - 2012-01-12 7:30 PM

Oh, dear... I wonder how big they are

Nikola

We'll include the sizes in the IB. For now, I can add that, each puzzle can be printed on A4 size page, and the cell sizes will still be large enough.

Yes, that was only a joke. I hope to see many new tricks in this puzzles. And all compliments for design.

Nikola

Administrator - 2012-01-12 8:37 PM

Rohan Rao - 2012-01-12 5:25 PM

Who designed the page?

David designed the logo and the banner.

Really nice.

Rohan Rao - 2012-01-13 9:27 AM

Administrator - 2012-01-12 8:37 PM

Rohan Rao - 2012-01-12 5:25 PM

Who designed the page?

David designed the logo and the banner.

Really nice.

I agree. Looks wonderful.

Looking forward to Puzzle Marathon

I hope, that the contest will be solvable in shorter time than 8 days. I have some exam on Monday ... :)

greenhorn - 2012-01-13 4:11 PM

I hope, that the contest will be solvable in shorter time than 8 days. I have some exam on Monday ... :)

It's clearly an 8 day puzzle championship. taking the 24 hour puzzle championship to a whole new level.

Marathon will last 8 full days. The organizers felt that holding this competition so close to the beginning of the year would mean that solvers would have ample vacation time to take the week off from work for solving these puzzles.

greenhorn - 2012-01-13 4:11 PM

I hope, that the contest will be solvable in shorter time than 8 days. I have some exam on Monday ... :)

Actually in the 21-29 period there are 9 days ;-)

That is even more. But this weekly contest is really interesting. For example we have only 7 days per week in Slovakia.

Its a "marathon week" :P

Edited by prasanna16391 2012-01-14 8:25 PM

greenhorn - 2012-01-14 6:59 PM

That is even more. But this weekly contest is really interesting. For example we have only 7 days per week in Slovakia.

Slovak people are very strange

greenhorn - 2012-01-15 9:59 AM

That is even more. But this weekly contest is really interesting. For example we have only 7 days per week in Slovakia.

It's a leap year.

Here's a sneak peek from my puzzle in the instruction booklet: http://t.co/LjF5cnOc

I hope you all like masyu. :)

Instruction Booklet is now available.
download | view

Think I have found an error in the IB. For "Loop the Loop":
"Answer key 1: For each marked row, enter the number of cells of the longest horizontally connected group of
cells inside the loop in that row. For the example, answer key is 945"
BUT the longest INSIDE the loop for the second selected row is 3... the 4 cells are outside the loop.

Or have I misunderstood and it means the longest horizontal stretch (regardless of whether inside or outside the loop)?

And for TAPA the answer keys appear to be reversed

Edited by reesylou 2012-01-16 6:11 AM

It is longest inside the loop (same as Double Decathlon). So 935 is the correct answer key. Updated pdf uploaded.

will there be any partial points for SAMURAI SUDOKU for solving some individual ones.
I know there is nothing indicated regarding this in IB but just to clarify it.

There is no partial points for any puzzle, including the Samurai.

While playing around with the rules of Black and White Loop, I made two puzzles which you can find on the Rätselportal: http://www.logic-masters.de/Raetselportal/Raetsel/zeigen.php?id=000... and http://www.logic-masters.de/Raetselportal/Raetsel/zeigen.php?id=000...

Does anyone have links to other puzzles of the type? I find it hard to get my head around.

Excellent puzzles rob. The 2nd one is really well made with lot of local and global solving. It is always interesting to start solving a loop puzzle from middle of the grid.

I had not seen this type, until Zoltan suggested that we include this type. He shared a smaller example as well (attached with this post)

(BWL.Example.8X8.png)

Attachments
----------------

BWL.Example.8X8.png (26KB - 8 downloads)

rob - 2012-01-17 2:49 AM

While playing around with the rules of Black and White Loop, I made two puzzles which you can find on the Rätselportal: http://www.logic-masters.de/Raetselportal/Raetsel/zeigen.php?id=000... and http://www.logic-masters.de/Raetselportal/Raetsel/zeigen.php?id=000...

Does anyone have links to other puzzles of the type? I find it hard to get my head around.

I haven't ever seen them online. they did feature in Breinbrekers, but haven't been in there in recent years. I thought I had a few laying around, which I had made. But the only ones I can find use 2 turns between different balls. I don't expect the puzzle to be as heavily clued as yours though. At least they weren't in Breinbrekers.

I don't expect mine to be typical at all, either. They're certainly quite different from the sample puzzle and the one above. Note that "heavily clued" is somewhat misleading, as "empty space" is often a stronger clue than a coloured circle for this type.

Some small questions/clarifications:

1) After 60 minutes has passed for a puzzle, there is absolutely no difference if I submit at 70 minutes or 7000 minutes? So I can just go to bed and submit it another day (if I eventually find the solution!). So no differences to scoring and no potential tie-breaking rules...?

2) As a consequence of that, is it possible to have more than one puzzle started at any time, and then they can be answered in any order?
For example, I could start all 10 puzzles on Saturday, look at them, submit one answer quickly for bonus points, then submit the other 9 during the week but with no time bonuses.

3) When you say the first wrong answer gets a 0.5 minute penalty, do you mean a 0.5 point penalty, or 0.5 minutes less time, or both?

and 4) If I submit wrong answer(s) for a puzzle but never submit a correct answer, will I get negative points or zero points for that puzzle overall?

kiwijam - 2012-01-18 8:28 AM

Some small questions/clarifications:

Bit surprised to see questions so late, I expected them much earlier after posting the IB :-)

kiwijam - 2012-01-18 8:28 AM
1) After 60 minutes has passed for a puzzle, there is absolutely no difference if I submit at 70 minutes or 7000 minutes? So I can just go to bed and submit it another day (if I eventually find the solution!). So no differences to scoring and no potential tie-breaking rules...?

I need to mention that we expect lots (yes LOTS) of players to complete most of the puzzles in 60 minutes and grab time bonus.
To answer your exact question, there will not be a difference in scores if a puzzle is submitted at 70 minutes or 100 minutes. In the unlikely event of ties in total score i.e. sum of 9 best scores, we'll use following tie breaker rules to determine the ranks
1. score with 10 puzzles
2. total time taken
Didn't want to complicate the IB with small points, but these would have been posted before the test starts

kiwijam - 2012-01-18 8:28 AM
2) As a consequence of that, is it possible to have more than one puzzle started at any time, and then they can be answered in any order?
For example, I could start all 10 puzzles on Saturday, look at them, submit one answer quickly for bonus points, then submit the other 9 during the week but with no time bonuses.

Yes, you can.
As I mentioned, we expect that the winners will be determined by "Bonus points", not just by "how many puzzles they solved".
There is also one more tweak here which you would have figured out anyway. After starting a puzzle "X", you can't start another puzzle until you submit the correct answer to "X" OR 1 hour is elapsed. This is done so that players don't start multiple puzzles at the same time by mistake, and lose bonus points.

kiwijam - 2012-01-18 8:28 AM
3) When you say the first wrong answer gets a 0.5 minute penalty, do you mean a 0.5 point penalty, or 0.5 minutes less time, or both?

0.5 points, But I think there is no difference.

This is the first time we are having this format (hopefully we'll have more depending upon players' feedback). So the scoring system may not be perfect. It is roughly borrowed from the Screen Tests we had earlier. But if anyone sees major flaws in the system, it is best to have it debated before the test starts.

someone please help out with "BRAILLE WORD SEARCH " ..
How to start??

Since I'm pretty new to puzzle creation, when LMI approached me to create for this test, they were smart enough to ask me to make 3 so that I got comfortable with the type first. So I made two practice puzzles, the first of which I have put up on my blog here : http://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/puzzle-no-18-loop-... and the second one will be put up tomorrow.

prasanna16391 - 2012-01-18 12:20 PM

Since I'm pretty new to puzzle creation, when LMI approached me to create for this test, they were smart enough to ask me to make 3 so that I got comfortable with the type first. So I made two practice puzzles, the first of which I have put up on my blog here : http://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/puzzle-no-18-loop-... and the second one will be put up tomorrow.

Thanks for your practise puzzle prasanna. I had 40 minutes fun with it! Nice to see how the masyu clues influence the loop clues and vice-versa.

swaroop2011 - 2012-01-18 11:26 AM

someone please help out with "BRAILLE WORD SEARCH " ..
How to start??

Choose a letter, translate it to Braille, scan the grid for occurrences. But you've probably thought of that yourself?

I must agree, that this puzzle was really fun, however it was too huge and surprisingly too easy for me. It takes me only 11 minutes to solve it. I hope that all the contest puzzles will be similarly easy and nice.

kiwijam - 2012-01-18 8:31 AM

and 4) If I submit wrong answer(s) for a puzzle but never submit a correct answer, will I get negative points or zero points for that puzzle overall?

The way we look at each puzzle, we consider them as a separate round. So 10 rounds for the whole contest.
It is best that one shouldn't get -ve points from any round. So, you will get 0 points for a puzzle, which has wrong submissions, but no eventual correct submission.

greenhorn - 2012-01-18 7:31 PM

I must agree, that this puzzle was really fun, however it was too huge and surprisingly too easy for me. It takes me only 11 minutes to solve it. I hope that all the contest puzzles will be similarly easy and nice.

I hope not, else I've made the wrong choice.

The one you solved today was the first ever puzzle I'd made of this hybrid type, so I hadn't yet understood ways to play with the difficulty. Practice for me, practice for you too

And Richard, you're welcome. :)

The image for the answer for Braille Word Search in the IB is wrong. The lines are off.

Looking forward to the marathon.

TheSubro

thesubro - 2012-01-18 9:01 PM

The image for the answer for Braille Word Search in the IB is wrong. The lines are off.

Looking forward to the marathon.

TheSubro

Erm, I don't think so, partial letters can overlap too, and the words Vodka, Milk and Soda can be read in the highlighted part of the solution.

I see now. You have simply drawn rectangles around each "word". I was misinterpreting how it was broken up on the image. My apologies (but at the same time, it has demonstrated a few complexities I had not truly appreciated before). Thanks.

TheSubro

It seems that it's a good strategy to guess the missing words on the Braille Word Search when you get near the end…

rob - 2012-01-18 9:53 PM

It seems that it's a good strategy to guess the missing words on the Braille Word Search when you get near the end…

That sounds like a fair warning to increase the number of arrow marks.

prasanna16391 - 2012-01-19 1:20 PMhttp://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/puzzle-no-19-loop-the-loops-practice-puzzle-2/Practice puzzle number 2 :)

Thanks for the practise puzzle.
Well constructed and took about 20 minutes for me to solve. Even I hope the contest puzzle will be as easy as this one :D

Regards,
Ravi

I have some older Braille Word Search puzzles on The Griddle that could be used for practice:
http://thegriddle.net/tags/braille

I don't quite recall the difficulty level or if I threw any other tricks in those, though.

ETA: I should also mention to save your answer to the Braille Word Search. Once the test is finished, the two words not found in the puzzle will unlock a badge if you have a profile page on The Griddle. I'm waiting to implement it though, just as an added precaution to prevent cheating. (Not that you honest puzzlers would do that. :))

Edited by davmillar 2012-01-20 11:08 AM

prasanna16391 - 2012-01-19 1:20 PM

http://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/puzzle-no-19-loop-...

Practice puzzle number 2 :)

Thanks for another nice puzzle. Again with nice logic steps. I definitely like this type!

I found one loop, but there is one cell that can be passed in two different ways: it's the 2 in Row 16, Column 20. When I found this spot halfway solving, I hesitated to proceed, since I thought I had made an error somewhere. But I ignored, went on en finished the puzzle, with this minor non-uniqueness left.
Maybe you can have another look at it?

Best regards, Richard

Richard - 2012-01-20 11:10 AM

prasanna16391 - 2012-01-19 1:20 PMhttp://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/puzzle-no-19-loop-the-loops-practice-puzzle-2/Practice puzzle number 2 :)

I found one loop, but there is one cell that can be passed in two different ways: it's the 2 in Row 16, Column 20. Maybe you can have another look at it?

Best regards,
Richard

Hi Richard,
This is the first type I have solved and solved it very carefully. I found it to be having unique solution.
I think you are wrong at the two consecutive white circles to the right top of R16C20 clue '2', for that part the path is unique and direct.
Please check it.

Regards,
Ravi

Richard - 2012-01-20 11:10 AM

Thanks for another nice puzzle. Again with nice logic steps. I definitely like this type!

You're welcome Richard.

Regarding the uniqueness, what Ravi said, you need to consider the behaviour of the two consecutive white circles above it. Its very much unique, I'm pretty sure of that now, I've had to check that one some 9 times by now because different people seem to find different spots to get confused

. Anyway I'll be putting up the solutions today sometime in 2 hours when I get over my laziness. You can check and tally if you want.

Solved the practice puzzle #2, I made a mess somewhere else, but it is certainly unique around the 2 at R16C20.

macherlakumar - 2012-01-20 11:27 AM

Richard - 2012-01-20 11:10 AM

prasanna16391 - 2012-01-19 1:20 PMhttp://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/puzzle-no-19-loop-the-loops-practice-puzzle-2/Practice puzzle number 2 :)

I found one loop, but there is one cell that can be passed in two different ways: it's the 2 in Row 16, Column 20. Maybe you can have another look at it?

Best regards,
Richard

Yep, sorry, my mistake. I worked overtime till late yesterday evening and decided that I still had right to have half an hour of puzzling fun so started the puzzle. Being tired is not the best condition to start puzzling, as I can see now. I missed indeed the two white dots on the right side. My sincere apologies for all the confusion!

Best regards, Richard

Richard - 2012-01-20 12:31 PM

Being tired is not the best condition to start puzzling, as I can see now. I missed indeed the two white dots on the right side. My sincere apologies for all the confusion!

Best regards, Richard

Its alright. I was in the same state while giving the Shapes and Sizes test, so I understand :D

Anyway, here's the solutions for both puzzles : http://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/practice-puzzle-so... Password - PP12.

Also, I made a Graffiti Snake which can also be used as practice I suppose, so I've put it up today even though its actually the 22nd puzzle I've made

Here it is : http://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/puzzle-no-20-graff...

A refreshingly different approach! The tenth puzzle is also there to address an unlikely tie ,apart from being there to be solved.Now, given that a tie is anyway at very high odds, i have a (better?) suggestion(thats too late for this week though),that i think fits well into this theme.If a tie occurs,calculate the most popular ( based on most solved & least time taken)puzzle,create an easier ( or harder) one of that type and start a tie-breaker) with that single puzzle (remember this would not have to be done anyway!,so no harm conceptualizing).

Announcements

Flash submission page is now enabled. There is a list with all puzzle types. After you click on a puzzle, you can click on "Start Puzzle" and your timer for the puzzle will start.
[ 8 puzzles are uploaded today. 1 will be uploaded tomorrow and last one will be uploaded next day ]

As discussed earlier, we have posted the grid sizes next to the puzzle. You can also see relative difficulty of puzzles. In fact the list is sorted based on difficulty (easy puzzles -> difficult puzzle)

I get a question from a player

I'm trying the marathon for the first time. I'm being prompted a
password to open the PDF. Where do I get the password?

Please click on "Start puzzle" to get the password.

Score Page - Link to score page http://logicmastersindia.com/M201201P/score.asp

Note that the score page will display partial scores, it will display only the puzzles you have solved.

Breaks are allowed

From the database, I can see that some players are solving one puzzle after another in quick succession. That is not a problem, and is allowed.
But Breaks between puzzles are also allowed. Breaks can be 1 minute or 1 hour or 1 day. You don't need to solve all puzzles in a stretch.

It is clearly mentioned in the IB that "Each puzzle can be started, solved and submitted independent of others, and in any order, anytime during the week."
I hope it is not ignored or misunderstood.

When i start a puzzle then I am not able to end it and start another puzle.
I am struck becoz the other puzzles show cannot be started.
plz hlp

sneha - 2012-01-21 9:08 AM

When i start a puzzle then I am not able to end it and start another puzle.
I am struck becoz the other puzzles show cannot be started.
plz hlp

Please check your answer to the puzzle you started. It is wrong. You have to wait either a) till submit it correctly or b) for an hour (whichever is minimum) before you can start the next puzzle.

Administrator - 2012-01-21 9:11 AM

sneha - 2012-01-21 9:08 AM

When i start a puzzle then I am not able to end it and start another puzle.
I am struck becoz the other puzzles show cannot be started.
plz hlp

Please check your answer to the puzzle you started. It is wrong. You have to wait either a) till submit it correctly or b) for an hour (whichever is minimum) before you can start the next puzzle.

Ok
Actually I did not want to solve this one but started it becoz it was the first one.
Anyways will have to wait for an hour

sneha - 2012-01-21 9:13 AM

Actually I did not want to solve this one but started it becoz it was the first one.
Anyways will have to wait for an hour

In that case, you can start the next puzzle now. Just refresh the submission page.

Administrator - 2012-01-21 4:41 AM

[ 8 puzzles are uploaded today. 1 will be uploaded tomorrow and last one will be uploaded next day ]

Some players are getting close to finishing all 8, it looks like we should have had posted all puzzles :-)

I tried hard to understand what the puzzles column (with such values as "1/1/1") means? I know it could be listing all the submission attempts ,but i am not sure as that is still a conflict in my case. I submitted only one puzzle and it shows three values! Damn i wasted lot of time on the pentomino grid.

anurag - 2012-01-21 9:08 PM

I tried hard to understand what the puzzles column (with such values as "1/1/1") means? I know it could be listing all the submission attempts ,but i am not sure as that is still a conflict in my case. I submitted only one puzzle and it shows three values! Damn i wasted lot of time on the pentomino grid.

I think it is: BONUS/CORRECT/SUBMITTED

Administrator - 2012-01-21 6:30 AM

Breaks are allowed

I hadn't planned on doing all 8 in a row. I had planned to do 2 or 3. But I was going pretty well. Every time I finished I thought "Okay, one more" till I had done them all.

anurag - 2012-01-22 12:05 AM

Greedy! ;)

Well I can understand that greed. If I sped through them at that rate even I'd want another one each time :P

It really feel good to complete one Marathon puzzle for the first time... :)

rvarun - 2012-01-22 1:43 AM

It really feel good to complete one Marathon puzzle for the first time... :)

Keep it up mate. 1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 3 and so on ;)

I'm having an interesting experience. Decided to start with the ones marked easy, took too long on l-t-l, broke the small regions and ran out of time on my second go and I'm the fastest in tapa for now. Not bad on b&w either. Wonderful puzzles so far :) Thanks everyone for the fun!

Curious question. I've been a lurker here doing puzzles after the fact and decided to register to try these ones during the contest. However, I have clicked to start a puzzle that I have no knowledge of and want to cancel and go to a different puzzle (namely the Braille Word Search, I accidentally started the Star Battle puzzle instead not knowing the mouseclick in that spot would start it). There seems to be no way to cancel; I either submit the correct solution or the timer is eternal. Does it end after a period of time has passed? Can the puzzle be cancelled (I won't be solving it, and looking at it now can't even place the first star)?

EDIT: Reading above this post, I see I must wait an hour. I had already tried what I knew would be a wrong submission hoping it would mark the puzzle "complete" but - obviously - it didn't. Is there any way to not have this submission count as a penalty since this puzzle was started by accident? Or are penalties only for individual puzzles - i.e. you lose 10 out of the 250 points, for example, for each wrong solution submitted for that puzzle only?

Cyclone

Edited by Cyclone 2012-01-22 5:09 AM

Cyclone - 2012-01-22 5:02 AM

Can the puzzle be cancelled (I won't be solving it, and looking at it now can't even place the first star)?

Cyclone

You can start next puzzle now. Refresh the submission page first.

Edited by debmohanty 2012-01-22 5:14 AM

Samurai Sudoku is now available.

Cyclone - 2012-01-22 5:02 AM

EDIT: Reading above this post, I see I must wait an hour. I had already tried what I knew would be a wrong submission hoping it would mark the puzzle "complete" but - obviously - it didn't. Is there any way to not have this submission count as a penalty since this puzzle was started by accident? Or are penalties only for individual puzzles - i.e. you lose 10 out of the 250 points, for example, for each wrong solution submitted for that puzzle only?

Cyclone

I guess you'll get a penalty for something only if you submit it correctly in the end.

nice-Puzzles.However-I'm-wondering-why-I'didn't-get-points-for-the-last-puzzle-even-after-submitting-it-correctly(it-showed-up-as-correctly-completed).Is-there-any-time-restrictions-which-I'm-not-aware-of?

Edited by harmeet 2012-01-22 6:17 PM

Harmeet, Richard, Swaroop, (and others who submitted in last 2 hours),
The score page is now updated to have your latest submission counted.

Graffiti Snake is now available.

Really fun test concept and a lot of very nice (large, but not very hard) puzzles. Thanks to all the authors and for Deb for having the grand concept.

Congratulations to Psyho and motris, who are the first two competitors to solve all 10 puzzles apart from our live testers.

ETA : nyoroppyi is the 3rd competitor to solve all.

Edited by debmohanty 2012-01-23 11:58 AM

I solved my kakuro too, honest I did, that brings me up to 10 as well! ;)

detuned - 2012-01-24 3:43 AM

I solved my kakuro too, honest I did, that brings me up to 10 as well! ;)

A small clarification about the score page - The score page displays partial score.
That means you can see the puzzles that you have solved. You can not see others' timings for puzzles you haven't solved. This has several implications, most importantly, the rank you see is not your final rank, even if you stop solving.

Thanks to all involved with this. I found it very enjoyable.
Just a quick question. Now that I've finished I can see a "w" against one of my scores and against those of other people who have finished. Is this supposed to represent the worst puzzle? If so it is not against my worst time or that of others.

detuned - 2012-01-24 3:43 AM

I solved my kakuro too, honest I did, that brings me up to 10 as well! ;)

I should perhaps look at the IB and find a second puzzle that I could perhaps solve

2706 minutes on a puzzle! All in a row, too. I'll let everyone know tomorrow if I still have a job.

puzzlemad - 2012-01-24 12:36 PM

Just a quick question. Now that I've finished I can see a "w" against one of my scores and against those of other people who have finished. Is this supposed to represent the worst puzzle? If so it is not against my worst time or that of others.

Yes, "w" is worst puzzle. There was a bug and "w" was misplaced for some. It is fixed now.

We also have added a feedback tab to the score page.

Is there a source for Different Neighbors puzzles that can be practiced? The instructions refer to IPC 2010 (Indian Puzzle Championship 2010), but there are no Different Neighbors puzzles there (just "Box", with some similarities but also big differences). Thanks.

Edited by PuzzleScott 2012-01-25 8:59 AM

Administrator - 2012-01-25 9:04 AM

Check

http://forsmarts.com/pdf/fpb_04.pdf

Actually issue 5 ( http://forsmarts.com/pdf/fpb_05.pdf ) contains the giant version of Different Neighbours, which could be a better practice in this case :)

Edited by forsmarts 2012-01-25 6:19 PM

In the instructions, it says the puzzles are "large, not hard". That, I can accept. However, when I (an average solver) need over 2 hours to do a puzzle, with no indication that amount of time might be needed, that's something to be avoided in future. I wouldn't normally start a 2 hour contest at 11:45pm, but expecting a 30-45 minute puzzle, it didn't seem unreasonable at the time.

Don't get me wrong, the puzzles are all (well, mostly) brilliant, so thanks to you and the authors for providing this mind food :)

I no-one is confusing PuzzleScot with PuzzleScott!

There is no way to get confused, thanks to your signature

Thanks for your input on specifying the expected solving time for puzzles. We certainly didn't think about it. I'm not exactly sure how we want to implement it if/when we do Marathon2. But I realize it will be very helpful to participants.

A possible solution could be to have an 'average solver' among your testers. (I'm happy to offer my services)
If the average solver is taking over 60 minutes of concentrated effort, it's probably too hard, and needs more clues to simplify a little.
Likewise, top solvers taking over 30 minutes is a sufficient clue too.

Once you realise you're not going to make it in under 60 minutes, you can put the puzzle away and solve it the next day. So I don't really think the harder puzzles are a problem. Though I admit I also expected to have a better chance at solving the puzzles that were labeled "hard" in under one hour.

To be embarrassingly honest, I didn't read all the instructions about scoring before I started! Hence my Kakuro/Sudoku being abandoned and returned to without pressure. I had naively assumed it was the total solve time that would be counted, like in all other contests.

I am trying to understand this part of the scoring instructions:

"Total score for a player will be computed by summing individual puzzle scores. For
players who submit all 10 puzzles correctly, their worst puzzle score will be
discarded."

I submitted them all correctly, but this sounds like I would have received the same score if I had stopped at nine puzzles. Or is it that the worst puzzle score is always dropped? Just wondering... either way, I had tons of fun solving!

Edited by jalbert 2012-01-26 8:32 AM

jalbert - 2012-01-26 8:32 AM

I submitted them all correctly, but this sounds like I would have received the same score if I had stopped at nine puzzles. Or is it that the worst puzzle score is always dropped? Just wondering... either way, I had tons of fun solving!

Depends on which puzzle you submitted last. e.g. Suppose you'd got a bonus in the last one you'd solved, and you've exceeded 1 hour in one of the previous 9, that one would be discarded and you'd have got a better score with the bonus. But of course if you'd exceeded the hour on the last puzzle too and got no bonus, then your score would be the same as it would've if you'd stopped at 9. Hope that clears it up. :)

Finally completed it all.. :)
It was fantastic solving all these puzzles.
my favourite puzzle was kakuro. I learned lot while solving that.
Messed up in 4 of the puzzles otherwise where i could have easily fetched up bonus..
Anyways nice ending..
Thanks to all the authors,LMI and Deb.
Will be waiting for Marathon2.

swaroop2011 - 2012-01-26 5:12 PM
Messed up in 4 of the puzzles otherwise where i could have easily fetched up bonus..

Well done in Tapa, Loop the loops and especially in Different Neighbours. I expect to you to get 10/10/10 in M2.

First I want to thanks to all organizers and authors for this excellent competition. All puzzles were great and I spend a wonderful time solving it. Yes, Kakuro drove me mad but I finally solve it, and I was more proud to myself to do that then if it was easy. I'm also happy for 2 reasons: for solving all puzzles and getting few bonuses (I'm average solver).
Difficulty of this puzzles was perfect. There are many people who already solve all puzzles, many of them get bonuses. I think this should be the point of competition which lasts for a week. Best solvers will spend more time than usually (in other online competitions) to solve puzzles but they will get bonuses and average solvers also could get bonus for some easier puzzles. And if some puzzle is too hard for you to solve it in 1 hour, you still have all week to solve it and get points. If there will be more competitions like this in the future (I hope it will be) there is no need for making easier puzzles. People will solve it too fast and then there's no point to make one week competition.

Thank you,
Will give my best..
and ya most importantly avoid my carelessness.
:)

debmohanty - 2012-01-26 5:51 PM

swaroop2011 - 2012-01-26 5:12 PM
Messed up in 4 of the puzzles otherwise where i could have easily fetched up bonus..

Well done in Tapa, Loop the loops and especially in Different Neighbours. I expect to you to get 10/10/10 in M2.

re large and hard puzzles being too hard - from an author's point of view I think it's nearly impossible to please everyone. When I put together the nikoli selection last July, I retained the idea of larger puzzles as a bonus because I knew the best solvers of nikoli puzzles would be miles ahead of the average solver in terms of time, and would have a fighting chance of getting 1 or maybe 2 (or as I was shown, 3 if you happen to be Hideaki!) done within the time. The test-solving times for each of those 3 puzzles averaged ~50+ minutes! This didn't really matter to me because for mere puzzling mortals the marathons would be a nice extra to complete out of time.

I don't think its appropriate to go into any sort of detail whilst this contest is still open, but for the kakuro I would say the fastest times are exactly in line with my expectations, and there are enough people scoring bonus time to justify the 1 hour bonus window together with the "hard" label. I suppose that's just my opinion though.

The one issue with the current scoring system as is see it is this. Solvers are essentially rewarded for excellent solves well under the par time, without being disproportionally punished for making a fiddly mistake, or simply having an off solve. There was one particular puzzle I was quite grateful for the opportunity to go out into town and get some shopping before finishing it off later in the evening. This is all well and good, so long as for each given puzzle the chance to affect your bonus is about the same, accounting for an individual solvers differing abilities across different puzzle types. This is a massively complex thing to try and encapsulate and measure such inexact science because different people solve different puzzle types in widely varying times.

Perhaps one solution for next time is to have different bonus windows for puzzles of objectively differing difficulties - for example 45/60/75 for easy/medium/hard? Even then, this seems problematic because you don't want one or two puzzles deciding the whole contest because there happen to be only a handful of solvers who are way ahead of everyone else - in this case you would be handing a free 30 points to people who are especially good at sudoku and kakuro (which is clearly a non-trivial overlap!).

Edited by detuned 2012-01-26 8:45 PM

detuned - 2012-01-26 7:44 AM
Perhaps one solution for next time is to have different bonus windows for puzzles of objectively differing difficulties - for example 45/60/75 for easy/medium/hard? Even then, this seems problematic because you don't want one or two puzzles deciding the whole contest because there happen to be only a handful of solvers who are way ahead of everyone else - in this case you would be handing a free 30 points to people who are especially good at sudoku and kakuro (which is clearly a non-trivial overlap!).

This seems a bit arbitrary and not a complete fix. While the "easy", "medium", and "hard" labels are rather true to my experience, the breadth of styles means for most solvers it will vary and the top times are telling that the labels aren't perfect. I think the best change is to use either rank on a puzzle for bonus scoring purposes or normalized time (like croco-puzzle). Then easy and hard can be compared, and certain puzzles won't end up being dropped just because they are harder than the rest. Thankfully we will have a lot of solving data with this competition as it has been very popular, so we can model what particular scoring systems would look like once it is finished.

Best of luck and skill to all those still competing.

As i see, the objective of this format is see if the solver can do the large puzzles in the first place.The difficulty indicators are certainly misleading for some of these.I really like the idea of using solving time as a primary indicator,as the difficulty only really points at the pleasure aspect.One can construct a very easy huge puzzle.On a negative note,the scoring system cannot be played much with unless
you are willing to make it a lot more informed.

I did all 10 puzzles, and eked out 57 bonus points, but my total score only shows as 957, and not 1057. Am I missing some element? Thanks. as always for being there in so many ways.

TheSubro

thesubro - 2012-01-27 2:00 AM

I did all 10 puzzles, and eked out 57 bonus points, but my total score only shows as 957, and not 1057. Am I missing some element? Thanks. as always for being there in so many ways.

TheSubro

I suppose your worst puzzle has been discarded? Its best 9 out of 10.

Para - 2012-01-21 10:58 PM

I think it is: BONUS/CORRECT/SUBMITTED

Missed this post earlier.

It is BONUS/CORRECT/STARTED

Well done Deb, a great concept and I hope we see something like this again.
Many thanks to the authors for 10 quality puzzles!

Really good format- it was nice to be able to spend as long or as little time in a row solving as you wanted, instead of having to find a 3 hour block of free time.
I would say that in my view, it makes sense to try to get the puzzles all at similar difficulty levels- here, someone who messed up the easiest puzzle was penalised a lot more (relative to other solvers) than someone who messed up the hardest puzzle. But I acknowledge that that may not be feasible.
One possible amendment to the scoring, to avoid that issue, could be: fastest solver gets 0 points. Everyone else scores a point for every second longer that they take, up to a max of 3600. Obviously lowest total score wins, so there must be a penalty for not solving a puzzle at all (perhaps 4000). The only problem would be knowing when there is no chance of getting any extra points, and hence being able to take a break (though I think you could assume that Mr. Snyder will finish everything within 30 mins, so you'd never need to continue on for longer than 90 mins).

Finally got back around to trying that Braille Word Search...managed to nail it, would have been quicker had I only noticed one word sooner (and if not for a five-minute interruption phone call).

I started thinking about converting Pennypress puzzles (American publisher) to Braille for fun. Realized it doesn't work exactly that way; in effect, it's almost like three separate small puzzles merging to become a single puzzle, with each horizontal row taking every third line in order.

Cyclone

Edited by Deb to remove the exact word. The test is still running :-)
Further edited by CycloneGU to replace what looks like bad language. Seriously, though, does noting the word here make a difference other than indicating that one word is in there? =)

Edited by Cyclone 2012-01-28 10:33 PM

Cyclone - 2012-01-28 10:06 PM

Further edited by CycloneGU to replace what looks like bad language. Seriously, though, does noting the word here make a difference other than indicating that one word is in there? =)

It probably doesn't.
Since the test is still running, I thought it is best that we don't reveal "a part of the puzzle". After the test is over, I would have un-edited the post, like I've done to several posts in past tests.

Thanks James and Nil for your feedback, and congrats for good scores.
We are certainly going to repeat the format, so we'll discuss about potential changes in the scoring system in the end.

Message to all players who have stopped solving at 7 or 8 puzzles. Please note that the rank that you see now in the partial score page will take a huge dip, you don't get to at least 9 puzzles. You still have 30 hours to participate further.

prasanna16391 - 2012-01-27 2:04 AM

I suppose your worst puzzle has been discarded? Its best 9 out of 10.

Was it really mentioned somewhere before the contest? I haven´t seen it until now. I stopped solving seriously after spoiling first puzzle.

debmohanty - 2012-01-28 12:42 PM

Meh, I'll edit it back in myself later.

Or you can.

I suppose it would be wrong to mention that the Samurai Sudoku uses the digits 1 through 9?

(Note I haven't solved it yet, or tried...will this evening perhaps.)

Random question. Why are typical smiley codes not used here?

Cyclone

Edited by Cyclone 2012-01-29 12:47 AM

greenhorn - 2012-01-29 12:13 AM

Was it really mentioned somewhere before the contest? I haven´t seen it until now. I stopped solving seriously after spoiling first puzzle.

See the Instruction Booklet "Scoring" paragraph, at the end, "Players who solve all 10 will have their worst puzzle discarded" or something like that.

Edited by prasanna16391 2012-01-29 12:59 AM

greenhorn - 2012-01-29 12:13 AM
Was it really mentioned somewhere before the contest? I haven´t seen it until now. I stopped solving seriously after spoiling first puzzle.

It is mentioned in "Scoring" section in the IB. See last line. And it was also mentioned in forum, while answering to kiwijam's questions.

Cyclone - 2012-01-29 12:45 AM
Random question. Why are typical smiley codes not used here?

The forum didn't have all smileys inbuilt. We added some smileys, but yes, it is not complete. Some other forums (e.g. phpBB) have a more exhaustive list of smileys.

prasanna16391 - 2012-01-29 12:59 AM

greenhorn - 2012-01-29 12:13 AM

Was it really mentioned somewhere before the contest? I haven´t seen it until now. I stopped solving seriously after spoiling first puzzle.

See the Instruction Booklet "Scoring" paragraph, at the end, "Players who solve all 10 will have their worst puzzle discarded" or something like that.

To "solve" the instructions is always the hardes puzzle for me

greenhorn - 2012-01-29 1:02 AM
To "solve" the instructions is always the hardes puzzle for me

Just like you should always solve the example of a new puzzle type, you should also "solve the instructions" of a new type test

Phew! Just finished! It was tough but enjoyable. Thanks to Deb and the team for the huge amount of work done and for a very attractive formula. I notice that in spite of the length of the contest the distances between players are minimal (which means that the 10 minutes I trew away stupidly on one puzzle for not reading the instructions costed me several positions....). Also glad I could end in bonus position on 9 puzzle out of 10 (well, I like to leave space for further improvement for next time....). Congratulations to all those which finished at the top, and relized times which are a bit embarrassing for the average player....

The formula is almost perfect. I feel I can support an improvement among those proposed. I do agree with detuned, when I says

detuned - 2012-01-26 8:44 PM
Perhaps one solution for next time is to have different bonus windows for puzzles of objectively differing difficulties - for example 45/60/75 for easy/medium/hard? Even then, this seems problematic because you don't want one or two puzzles deciding the whole contest because there happen to be only a handful of solvers who are way ahead of everyone else - in this case you would be handing a free 30 points to people who are especially good at sudoku and kakuro (which is clearly a non-trivial overlap!).

perhaps next time the most difficult puzzles will not be of the same type of this time.... however I feel that life has been particularly cruel for a player which solved one of the difficult puzzles in, say, 59'55" and got 0.1 bonus points, i.e. only .1 point more of a player who solved it in 2 hours, particularly if only a handful of solvers could finish that puzzle with the bonus. so the formula 45/60/75 (and perhaps 90), although arbitary, is a good idea and I support it.

while I do not agree with Motris

motris - 2012-01-26 9:13 PM

I think the best change is to use either rank on a puzzle for bonus scoring purposes or normalized time (like croco-puzzle).

The formula relies on the possibility, which many players have used, to stop solving a puzzle, putting it in a corner and solve it the next day or later once the possibility for the bonus has been lost. In this case the concept of normalized time is heavily affected and meaningless because the number of player doing this will vary from puzzle to puzzle, depending on the difficulty. Also, a player needs to know in advance the criteria of awarding the bonus.

I renew my thanks to the organizers and authors and look forward for the next one of these.
Stefano

Stefano, I was trying very hard to not give a specific formula, because I think it is more important to speak to the goals of a scoring formula and match them to the test. As a contest constructor I will say that it is very hard before the test, when you've seen just 2 or 3 solvers, to put a fair value on all of the puzzles, particularly with complicated bonus. Also, when having so many constructors (7), it will be very hard to have consistency of difficulty. To say puzzle X should be 75 or 45 might be better, but it might not be correct. And if the puzzle you made into a 75 turned out much easier than a 60 then you are really screwing up the test results by using a guess, and not a more robust formula.

A simple formula might be "top time + 30 minute window" gets some bonus, like what Nilz mentions, which would still have an effective one hour cut-off. I personally prefer something like this:

Solvers in the top 10th percentile earn bonus. Specifically, the top solver earns 100 + X points, solvers in top 10th percentile earn bonus proportion to time gap from 100th to 90th percentile. Solvers at 90th and below get 100 points. With the results I'm seeing on this test, there still is a stable "one hour is too long, so you can start over whenever" effect, and actually for many puzzles the time is now more like 40 minutes. But now you let the competitors scale the times, not 2 or 3 test-solvers.

I'm a bit frustrated that my best relative puzzle performance on this test is the puzzle I have to drop. I'm not frustrated enough because of how I did on other puzzles, but I want a good system that works in general for this kind of test but maintains the goal of removing pressure after one hour. I probably should not have mentioned croco-puzzle specifically, because I did not mean a 3000 to 0 scale. I meant something more like a 3000 to 2700 scale where every solver below 2700 goes up to 2700 whenever they finish. I hope something like this would meet your approval, because my goal is not to ruin the benefit of having comfort to sleep on a mistake and start again the next day.

Edited by motris 2012-01-29 11:49 AM

Feeling very happy after solving all the puzzles :)
Honestly I did not think I could make this far.
I should have been aggressive and solved few of them on paper (actually solved all of them using MS Paint) at least that would have fetched some bonus.

Thanks to Deb, LMI team and the authors for a wonderful contest.
I hope everyone will complete all the puzzles.

Regards,
Ravi

I really enjoyed the puzzles, thanks to all the authors for the fun! Given the differences in difficulties, I also think it would make sense to normalise the puzzles based on observed performance.

Also congrats Macher, I also used mspaint for everything and it can be annoying at times. I am now trying Paint.NET which is similar but has layers and unlimited undos - useful for when you want to *cheat*!

Good to know there are other people who have to struggle with paint during these tests too

Score page is under maintenance, and will be back online soon.

Submission is now disabled for Puzzle Marathon.

Puzzle Marathon is now over. Congratulations to motris, MellowMelon and Kota for winning.

Individual puzzle wise, there were 6 winners. Volxa (Kakuro), motris (Loop The Loops, Samurai Sudoku, Braille Word Search, Pentomino Areas), xevs (Graffiti Snake), Para (Black And White Loop, Small Regions), ACM (Tapa)

In a turn of events, I have many individuals to thank to for this event.
Thanks to Rohan, Serkan and Zoltan to first listening to the idea and believing in it, and then adding all the required inputs. The scoring system, the puzzles types could have been very different without their suggestions.
Thanks to all puzzle authors : Tom (Kakuro), Prasanna (Loop The Loops), Serkan (Graffiti Snake), David Millar (Braille Word Search and for the logo), Zoltan (Black And White Loop, Small Regions), Vladimir (Pentomino Areas and Tapa). I wrote Different Neighbours and Samurai Sudoku, and unfortunately the difficulty of Samurai was not appropriate.

I hope everyone enjoyed the test.

Link to score page : http://logicmastersindia.com/M201201P/score.asp
If your name is missing in the score page, it is intentional. Please PM me for clarification.

Thanks for some great puzzles. Regarding Samurai: I had figured the IB version was just going to be much harder than the actual one. If it had been mentioned that the two would be similarly hard, I could have pointed out there would be a problem. I'm sure many others could have too.

I find it funny how my individual puzzle rankings resemble my WPC playoff ones. Here I didn't win any of the puzzles but my time was in the top 5 for all of the types I care about (sudoku and word searches are bleh). Similarly in the WPC playoff: on every puzzle I had the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th fastest time of the competitors that finished, but never the fastest. (which reminds me that I got sent the time breakdowns in an email with a promise that it would be posted publically soon after, but I guess that slipped someone's mind)
Apparently I'm better at being consistent than having incredible times on individual puzzles.

One thing I would like to discuss that wasn't in the feedback is answer extraction. Obviously some of these methods are tried and true (Sudoku, Star Battle), and I continue to find the "longest group" method very nice as well (Tapa, Snake, Loops) especially given its advantages in an instant grading system.

I haven't seen the Kakuro and Different Neighbors style before, but that might be one of the cleanest of any mechanisms I've seen. Finding marked squares is often a pain, and in November's test it was even common to miss some I's/J's. This one-per-column system with all of those columns marked solves that issue in an extremely nice way. I hope this one is adopted by all future tests where appropriate.

The Word Search and Pentomino Areas extractions were fine - not amazing but not at all bad. Black and White Loop was the only mechanism that really bothered me. It's a good method for smaller grids, but keeping track of things on the large grid was tricky. I was half expecting to get the red X on my first submission for that one (the time penalty wasn't enough to justify further checking).

Thanks for the test. Awesome, as always.

Funny story: Even though Graffiti Snake was one of my best puzzles, relatively speaking, one piece of logic I'd been using was completely bogus: Since the head and tail were in opposite corners, the snake has to cross each line an odd number of times. So, for example, if there are an odd number of clues in a column, exactly one of the black bars has to touch the edge of the grid, so that there aren't an even number of gates. However! Since a snake could enter the gate and leave on the same side it entered, that wouldn't count as a crossing. Therefore, bogus logic. (An example of a column that fails my test would be the one with 5-3-3.)

I hope I explained that well enough. It just means that I got really lucky.

Edited by figonometry 2012-01-30 8:31 AM

Reg answer key mechanisms :

Kakuro and Different Neighbours - During my solve, I couldn't find any row / column / contiguous cells to be marked as answer key. (Kakuro for being so scattered solve and DN for being DN). When I shared the circled cells with one circle per column idea to Tom, he instantly agreed that this will be a cleaner approach. I just adopted the same for DN.

Zoltan was never a big fan of marking letters inside the grid for B&W Loop. I was not keen on marking "rows with longest length". I have been seeing how players are making mistakes in the longest length mechanism for a while now. It was my decision to mark letters inside the grid, rather than arrows outside the grid - based on this poll results - http://logicmastersindia.com/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=358
Yes, for a big grid, it is not an easy key, but the other way I looked at it, when you are trying to find the answer key, and you don't visit some letters, that means you definitely have a mistake in the solve.

We discussed about some potential scoring systems. I'm attaching the individual solving times (in excel form) so that it will be easier to do any kind of simulations.
For example : bonus should be given only to players with solving time < 30 minutes + best time is captured in the excel.

Link : http://logicmastersindia.com/M201201P/MarathonSolvingTimes.xlsx

Edited by debmohanty 2012-01-30 10:50 AM

MellowMelon - 2012-01-30 7:47 AM
One thing I would like to discuss that wasn't in the feedback is answer extraction. Obviously some of these methods are tried and true (Sudoku, Star Battle), and I continue to find the "longest group" method very nice as well (Tapa, Snake, Loops) especially given its advantages in an instant grading system.

For Snake, it was a problem. I found many players submitting "longest black cells", not "longest snake part".
I decided not to penalize players for making this answer key misunderstanding, but their bonus was not adjusted.

That reminds me to add a note that, during Decathlon we put lot of effort to make sure that all possible answer keys are captured in the system (e.g. row / column swaps). I didn't have to do similar effort in this case because of "single puzzle" submission mechanism.

All puzzles are pinned and uploaded as a single pdf without password here

Thanks to all who participated, and to Deb for allowing me to contribute a puzzle and design the logo for this test.

If you have an account on my blog, The Griddle, and solved my braille word search in this test, enter the two missing words in your code entry page to unlock the new "Run For Your Life!" badge: http://thegriddle.net/home/badges/18

I noticed that some of the authors have participated as players too. They have been awarded an arbitrary 100 points for the puzzle they provided. I believe this is penalizing. In a competition in which the difference between players is given by the bonuses (which is good, and is the strongest point of this beautiful competition), it is equivalent to deny them the opportunity to earn a bonus in the puzzle they provided (for which they are supposed to be strong solvers too...). In my opinion it could be fair to award the author of a puzzle a bonus score equivalent to the average of their bonus scores obtained in the remaining puzzles solved (including zeroes, if any).

I agree that 100 points is not fair to all authors (it was not arbitrary though, 100 was assigned based on the assumption that an author should be able to solve his puzzles, and we just took the worst case scenario where there is no bonus). So, yeah, it is bit harsh.

In fact we started "best 9 of 10" to handle authors' cases. But later, 9 of 10 turned out to be very essential for this kind of contest even otherwise. So, we can give some bonus points based on forcolin's formula above. Or, we can say for authors, it should be best 8 of 9, and then multiply the score by 9/8.

Is it a good idea to have an option where a player can choose if he/she needs a hint to solve a puzzle at the cost of some X points depending on the time lapsed from the start of puzzle along with reduced bonus system (if applicable) ?
This might help few solvers to have the satisfaction of solving all the puzzles and create more interest in puzzles.

Regards,
Ravi

debmohanty - 2012-01-30 8:41 PM

Or, we can say for authors, it should be best 8 of 9, and then multiply the score by 9/8.

Can we make mine best 4 of 9 for this one and then multiply?

Anyway, on a serious note, I personally was fine with this format because I considered it a bonus in itself to co-author and participate in the same test. However, if everyone feels that what Stefano or Deb have suggested is fine to implement next time, then all the better!

I was surprised to be fastest on 2 puzzles. I don't generally top lists. As Palmer said he didn't finish any puzzle fastest in the playoffs, I didn't score any top 3 spots in any round, but still finished 5th overall after 2 days on the WPC before the playoffs.
I'm also surprised a bit to be in the top 5 as I've never considered myself good at solving big puzzles on speed. I usually make too many mistakes. It was fun, but I think I would have done better on the Samurai and Graffiti Snake if I had solved them in a row with the other 8 puzzles. I hasn't realised when I started all 10 puzzle types weren't listed to be honest. Will remember that for next time.

I think the scoring probably works better with a distance from the top time system. It seems a bit weird to be the fastest solver in a type and have to drop that puzzle.

Now that the full puzzle booklet is available, I am finding that it crashes my Adobe within a few seconds of opening it. Can we get individual puzzle versions?

Cyclone

Cyclone - 2012-01-31 4:46 AM

Now that the full puzzle booklet is available, I am finding that it crashes my Adobe within a few seconds of opening it. Can we get individual puzzle versions?

Cyclone

Individual puzzle booklets without password uploaded at http://logicmastersindia.com/M201201P/

macherlakumar - 2012-01-30 9:33 PM

Is it a good idea to have an option where a player can choose if he/she needs a hint to solve a puzzle at the cost of some X points depending on the time lapsed from the start of puzzle along with reduced bonus system (if applicable) ?
This might help few solvers to have the satisfaction of solving all the puzzles and create more interest in puzzles.

It doesn't make sense to me. It also is very impractical.

macherlakumar: I see some use in having easier puzzles available for people to try and to get started with, but to implement them in a test here is impractical, and this really doesn't seem the place for it. If there are any types that anyone wants to start on but where some simpler puzzles are needed, I strongly suggest contacting some puzzle authors in the community and requesting them. Speaking for myself, I'm happy to take requests, and many others in the community probably would be at least somewhat accommodating too.

Administrator - 2012-01-31 6:18 AM

macherlakumar - 2012-01-30 9:33 PMIs it a good idea to have an option where a player can choose if he/she needs a hint to solve a puzzle at the cost of some X points depending on the time lapsed from the start of puzzle along with reduced bonus system (if applicable) ?This might help few solvers to have the satisfaction of solving all the puzzles and create more interest in puzzles.

It doesn't make sense to me. It also is very impractical.

Yes you are right I did not think through this thoroughly.

Regards,
Ravi

Time for some statistics -

Number of Puzzles Vs Starts / Finishes / Bonus

It is extremely pleasing to see that 124 players finished all 10 puzzles.
Also, on an average (of 259 players who submitted at least 1 puzzle), a player finished 7.4 puzzles.

And because of the interesting bonus system, here is how the 20th / 50th score compared against the top score.

From the feedback page :

There is a bit of story behind Graffiti Snake. The first version of IB had "Paint By Number". We wanted to include PNB because, as per Rohan's word, PNB is king of big puzzles. But before I asked Serkan to make PNB, I suggested that he should make a Graffiti Snake instead. (I get 1% credit for selecting the type, and Serkan gets 99% credit for making a beautiful puzzle)

Next 3 sets of graphs pretty much suggest that the corresponding aspects of the test were close to perfect.

Many players voted that they would use Online solving if provided. We will try to provide that next time, but no promises. We face enough issues while supporting both online and paper for Sudoku tests.

Of 149 players, 144 players voted that they would participate in future marathons, either as player or as player + author.

I found a technical issue at the result page(score.asp)
... columns of each puzzle are sorted improperly when they are displayed in 'Points'(not 'Submission Time').

They are to be sorted in numerical order(like 'Points' and 'Bonus' columns),
but they are sorted in character-based(ASCII) order ...

# I remember that some of them were correctly sorted a few days ago.

I'd really appreciate someone giving a break down of an entry point into Different Numbers - I really struggle with these and got absolutely nowhere with this particualr one.

debmohanty - 2012-01-30 6:30 AM

Puzzle Marathon is now over. Congratulations to motris, MellowMelon and Kota for winning.

Individual puzzle wise, there were 6 winners. Volxa (Kakuro), motris (Loop The Loops, Samurai Sudoku, Braille Word Search, Pentomino Areas), xevs (Graffiti Snake), Para (Black And White Loop, Small Regions), ACM (Tapa)

And Serkan (Different Neighbours)

Why did I have to wait till someone point me that?

reesylou - 2012-02-01 6:10 AM

I'd really appreciate someone giving a break down of an entry point into Different Numbers - I really struggle with these and got absolutely nowhere with this particualr one.

There is cheeky start to the Different Neighbours at the top right corner.
Note that X has to be 1 or 2, otherwise the top right is not solvable uniquely.

Then transferring the 4 we get that the 2X2 cell can only be 3.

Who are the test solvers ? I am not sure if it is mentioned somewhere and I missed it or it is not mentioned anywhere.

Regards,
Ravi

macherlakumar - 2012-02-01 10:27 AM

Who are the test solvers ? I am not sure if it is mentioned somewhere and I missed it or it is not mentioned anywhere.

Oops... I didn't mention anywhere.
We had 3 live-testers this time - Branko, Prasanna and Rohan. While everyone else had 9 days to solve the puzzles at their own comfort timings, these guys had to solve all puzzles within two days time. Fortunately, we didn't find any issues during their solving and their scores remained official.

aldentea - 2012-02-01 5:35 AM

I found a technical issue at the result page(score.asp)
... columns of each puzzle are sorted improperly when they are displayed in 'Points'(not 'Submission Time').

Yes, that is a bug. Too late to fix though

I have done some analysis of the score and bonus system.

First of all, in my opinion the scoring system in this contest was very good because every player had a realistic possibility of gaining bonuses on most puzzles, which means that the rank is very close to the sum of the times obtained in the individual puzzles. There is an exception, the Samurai Sudoku which was much more difficult than the remaining puzzles, and in which only 20 players were awarded bonus points, and which even the best solver (motris) had to drop as his worst result.

Overall, the number of players gaining a bonus was 1108 out of 1927 (57.5%), relatively high, and this is the distribution among the various puzzles.

If we consider the percentage of players which gained a bonus as a measure of the difficulty of the puzzle, we must conclude that the easiest of the puzzle was the Braille wordsearch, with 84% of the submissions gaining a bonus. This was originally indicated as an AVERAGE puzzle. Which means that an attempt to allocate different times (or different bonus thresholds) to puzzle of different difficulties as proposed by detuned, may be affected by wrong evaluation of the difficulty.

I have also analysed the proposal of awarding bonuses only to those players completing a puzzle within a fixed time (30 minutes) from the top solver. The total number of players earning a bonus in this case would be of 786, 40.8%, and the distribution is the following.

In my personal opinion, this system would be much worse. Not only the peculiarity of the Samurai sudoku is not solved (of course, 30 minutes margin on a very though puzzle means much less for a tough puzzle than for an easy one) but the total number of bonusus decreases dramatically, punishing the players earning 10-15 points with a solution time between 40 and 50 minutes. Overall, almost 350 submissions would earn no bonus at all, and this would be concentrated in the middle category solvers. Also, for those players, the average bonus would be reduced therefore the score would privilege a player with a very good time in just one puzzle against a player with decent times overall, and I do not think this is (or should be) the target of this competition.

I have tried to develop a different system. This is based on assigning to the top solver a bonus of, say, 50 points, to define a bonus threshold to n times the time of the top solver, and to calculate the bonus by linear interpolation between these two values. I have prepared 3 scenarios, with n= 4, 5 and 6 respectively. Which means that a player would earn a bonus if his/her time was 4, 5 or 6 times the time of the best solver, or better.

The following distributions are obtained

The total number of bonus scores is 905 (46.9%) for n=4, 1118 (58%) for n=5 and 1275 (66%) for n=6.

All these calculations give a better distribution of the scores among the puzzles, (the number of players earning a bonus on the samurai is now comparable to the other puzzles) and the situation which better approaches the system adopted is for n=5. Of course this system would give different results in terms of final ranking, benefitting mainly those players which had a good time on the Samurai, but not good enough to gain a bonus on it.

The negative consequence is that, with the system adopted for this competition, it was clear that after one hour from starting a player could put the puzzle in a corner to solve it the next day. With this system it could be possible (except for the very first player to start a puzzle) to show a “current bonus threshold” as an indication about when a player could give up, and also as an indication of the level of difficulty of the puzzle as required by Puzzlescot, but this indication may change with the time, as strong players will set up best times.

Overall, I think that the system adopted for Marathon number one has the advantage of being simple, and could be adopted again without variation if only the organizers will avoid to use puzzles with a remarkable difference in difficulty, such as the Samurai Sudoku. If a new system has to be adopted, a calculation based on a bonus threshold of minimum 5 or 6 times the time of the best solver can be an improvement and could allow to use puzzles of different level of difficulty, but I am convinced that very difficult puzzles requiring the average solver much more than an hour to be solved, should be avoided for practical reasons.

Excel Analysis : http://logicmastersindia.com/M201201P/MarathonSolvingTimes_forcolin...

Stefano,

Thanks for the details analysis and many insights. The %bonus per puzzle is indeed useful information.

1) About Braille Word Search - Yes, this puzzle was marked as AVERAGE difficulty. For some reason, this puzzle looked scary (to me, and I guess many others). As you can see this puzzle has least number of submissions, even compared to Graffiti which was uploaded 48 hours later.

2) About Samurai - A lot has been said in the forum about this puzzle. All I can repeat that it was a bad choice. It is doubly bad considering that I insisted all authors to make puzzles with 12-18 minutes target time for top solvers for each puzzle.
The low percentage for Kakuro is not really surprising. This is the only classic-Nikoli puzzle and we know that some players are extremely fast in those. (That is also the reason we had exactly 1 classic-Nikoli puzzle)

3) About 5XN or 6XN bonus system - This is really innovative. If the puzzle difficulties are varying a lot, we might have to follow something similar.
But as you mentioned, if there were no Samurai, there is little need for changing the current bonus system. The current bonus system has 2 major benefits
a) it is extremely simple
b) the target for each puzzle is published and is well known

So, in future marathons, we would first make sure that there are no Samurai like puzzles. That solves majority of the problems. It will be impossible to make all puzzles of similar difficulty. But as long as there is no puzzle extremely difficult, we should be ok.

There other points are
1) whether it is fair to compare scores by just adding up individual puzzle times of varying difficulties
2) whether ranks in individual puzzle should be given any importance (like LMI Ratings)
I think this post from motris briefs about these two, but it does not have specific formula.

Thanks once again for your analysis and your suggestions to improve everything that we should.

This is incredible data and I'm glad to finally have something like this in hand. I'm not sure what Stefano is trying to optimize (uniformity of percent achieving bonus? - is this really the relevant parameter?) and I haven't had time to dive too deep into the info myself. But I think the most fascinating graphs so far are just looking at the trends in time for each puzzle across the top 100 solvers and seeing how using the "nth solver" at any point is a good measure of the relative ranking of a puzzle's difficulty.

I've linked to two images, one with a view of the whole test and one with just a view of the first hour which cuts Pentomino, Kakuro, and Samurai from the top 100 solver graph but gives a much better picture of the other puzzles. I think the data establishes a clear order of Tapa < Loop The Loop < Braille/Small Regions < Diff Neighbors/Graffiti < Black and White Loop < Pentomino/Kakuro < Samurai.

Notice that top time is probably the worst of the 100 choices for ranking the difficulty of the puzzles (and therefore the worst to use to normalize by multiplication or other means). Looking at the 10th solver (95th percentile) seems much better though. The top time suggests Pentomino is slightly easier than Black and White Loop. The 10th place (or any spot from 10-100) shows it is a 20-25% harder puzzle than the Black and White Loop for the vast majority of solvers.

These graphs also show me good characteristics to fit to either a rank-based or a normalized scoring model to get all the puzzles back on par with each other. The linear nature actually suggests rank may be best, with perhaps 150 to the top solver, 149 to the second, down to 100 for the 51st and later. For only Samurai, which we agree is too hard, would this system break down at one hour. But I do think you need to treat Kakuro and Pentomino differently from the easiest 6, and maybe even Black and White Loop as well. I disagree that only Samurai was an outlier on this test, and I'll let these graphs speak for themselves on that point.

Edited by motris 2012-02-02 10:14 AM

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First of all thank you for the nice contest.

Beside any data analysis: for me (as mediocre solver) the Sudoku was the only puzzle, that felt a little bit like marathon. All the other ones are just a little bit bigger than usual, which didn't matter, because I could solve one or two per day. If you want to test endurance, I would suggest the following: Give an even longer general time window (maybe four weeks), so that much people can find the time to participate. In this window, you can start the contest at any time, which gives you a 24h-window working like the last contest.

I think a general problem of this contests is the time difference between a top solver and an average solver. In a 2 hour contest, which the best solvers hardly finish, I will get 1/3-1/2 of the points and need maybe 2-3 more hours, if I want to finish all puzzles. If the contest should feel like a marathon for the best, this would mean at least 4-5h for them. But if it aims for "time needed for a fixed amount of puzzles" instead of "finished puzzles in a fixed time" that would mean something like 15 hours for me, which isn't suitable. And if I can do it in different sessions it's not really a marathon for me.

(This reminds me of an interview with an hobby-marathonist which I read a while ago. He said things get easier after you can beat the 3h-mark, because you don't have to run so long, if you're fast enough ;-) )

debmohanty - 2012-02-01 3:26 PM

Ahhh.. of course. I used assuming uniqueness in some of the other puzzles, but the Different Numbers type always cause me problems, so I didn't think to use that here - and I unfortunately chose to focus on the bottom left corner.

I'll give it another go with that in mind. Thanks.

This thread is turning into a bit of a monster, but as a point of interest, I've just posted some kakuro thoughts on the UKPA boards:

http://forum.ukpuzzles.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=534#p5675

detuned - 2012-02-04 8:56 PMThis thread is turning into a bit of a monster, but as a point of interest, I've just posted some kakuro thoughts on the UKPA boards:http://forum.ukpuzzles.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=534#p5675

I want to say one thing about your Kakuro, it is simply "Beauty and Beast" :).
Beauty : In the way it is designed.
Beast : The toughness in solving.
I am not sure about the break-in as top left as you mentioned, I am sure when I solved this, I solved it from bottom of 'I' on below left and worked to the top.

Regards,
Ravi

I've now gone ahead and played with the scoring model and tried the 150 for 1st, 149 for 2nd, 148 for 3rd, down to 100 for 51st through last finisher. I like this system a lot because it makes all puzzles equal for potential bonus. Each puzzle has a total of 1275 bonus points split between the top 50 finishers. This means an "easy" puzzle will not give too much bonus to too many solvers. A "hard" puzzle will not give too little bonus to too few solvers. Each puzzle has same final value. Obviously, the choice of top 50, and the linear progression of bonus, were arbitrary and can be adjusted for a given test. I kept the best 9 out of 10 approach.

I've attached the stats for the top 20 (yellow shading is the dropped puzzle with rank scoring and I've shaded all tied options where those exist, red font is the dropped puzzle with current scoring). The average rank column is for the top 9 puzzles for that solver, but shows that deu and kota were very close and para and misko also very close in overall performance based on rank across the test. The time scoring had a different rank in these cases.

I have also attached my excel spreadsheet if someone wants to play with this type of system further. I'm already looking at how to use it on my next decathlon test.

Edited by motris 2012-02-05 3:29 AM

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Hello, all. I consider myself a medium-level solver, and this was definitely one of the most exciting tests I've seen here. It's the first test that I've solved all puzzles while the test was running. The fact that time solving time was not a major factor in the test (both in terms of the time alotted to take the test, and the factor that time had in assigning a score) helped to relieve a lot of pressure from solving, making for a more enjoyable experience for me. As solvers talk about different scoring systems, I hope that the appeal of a test like this to the not-top solvers is retained.

I'd like to see that we limit the number of solvers getting no bonus, because when that happens, ties accumulate around the multiples of the base-point per puzzle, and which puts more focus on the time solved.

That was one of the things that came to mind when I read motris's system. It seems there's four things a ranking system for a test like this has to deal with
1. Getting a proper ordering at the top.
2. Giving out enough bonus in the middle to avoid huge ties.
3. Being able to set a hard cutoff for no bonus (60 minutes here) so solvers that want to be competitive don't have to set aside an indeterminate amount of time to do each puzzle.
4. Being able to throw out a contestant's worst performance in a sensible way. (This basically requires that the top time be given the same amount of bonus for all puzzles.)

I'm inclined to agree with motris that the rank-based system is the best way to do 1 and 4. I've played around with several modifications to his system to try to do 2 and 3 better, but only two ideas don't have anything egregiously wrong with them:

A. Have a double-layered system where the top 25 or so use the system motris has (50-25 bonus points) and everyone else between 25th and the 60 minutes has points assigned by linear interpolation (25-0 bonus points). The interpolation could be done either by rank or by time. Some weaknesses are that it seems needlessly complex and that if there aren't many more than 25 people who solved in under 60 minutes the gradient for the 25-0 range could be inappropriately steep.

B. If a puzzle has N people finish in under 60 minutes, award 201-[rank] points for solvers finishing faster than 60 (so 200 for 1st) and 201-N points for everyone else. Have some floor (50?), a point total which anyone who solves the puzzle is guaranteed, in case close to 200 people finish in an hour. Numbers can be tweaked obviously. One "weakness" of this system is that it gives a different amount of points for finishing each puzzle assuming you cross the 60 minutes mark. But that might be a feature as opposed to a bug, since it will make the hardest puzzles worth much more to finish.

MellowMelon - 2012-02-04 5:00 PM

That was one of the things that came to mind when I read motris's system. It seems there's four things a ranking system for a test like this has to deal with
1. Getting a proper ordering at the top.
2. Giving out enough bonus in the middle to avoid huge ties.
3. Being able to set a hard cutoff for no bonus (60 minutes here) so solvers that want to be competitive don't have to set aside an indeterminate amount of time to do each puzzle.
4. Being able to throw out a contestant's worst performance in a sensible way. (This basically requires that the top time be given the same amount of bonus for all puzzles.)

This is a terrific framework to view the scoring concerns. I chose 50 because it would "work" for 9 of the 10 puzzles, but I could have chosen 100 if I wanted 7 of the 10 puzzles to work, dropping kakuro and pentomino as being too hard too. But I agree a stable system that only rewards bonus to those under an hour is good and I think of your options, (A) is closest to what I might imagine being a good leveraged system. Let's say this:

"For all solvers that finish in under 60 minutes, they will earn a bonus based on their final rank. The first 25 solvers will earn a bonus of 25 points for 1st, down to 1 point for 25th. Also, with M solvers under one hour on a puzzle, the Nth solver will earn (M+1-N)/M * 25 additional points."

That certainly does (3). And while this might seem complex with two different parts, they independently serve to do (1) and (2) fairly. You cannot do just the former and capture (2). But you also cannot do just the latter and fairly do (1), as on a puzzle where many people qualify versus a puzzle where few people qualify, the top tier being 125, 124.8, 124.6 is much different than 125, 124, 123. The half-half system ends up being a good compromise. Taking the best score on 9 of 10 does the last part and your parameters are met.

I've remodeled the scoring with this new melon-like (A) as I specifically restated it. I was curious to see which if any puzzles really broke the scoring. Samurai sort of does as it only has 20 solvers in one-hour bonus zone, but the formula still is basically ok. Also, now only two solvers (158 and 159) tie at 900, and there is a lot more grading of intermediate scores. Give it a look if you are really interested.

rank2.xlsx (hosted on my webspace because of a 100kb rule here.)

Edited by motris 2012-02-05 7:55 AM

Fully agree with Melon's list, especially point 3

MellowMelon - 2012-02-05 6:00 AM
3. Being able to set a hard cutoff for no bonus (60 minutes here) so solvers that want to be competitive don't have to set aside an indeterminate amount of time to do each puzzle.

While we are trying to design a robust system that determines the relative scores / ranks at the top accurately and fairly, it is equally important to keep most other players in mind. In my view, the 60 minutes cut off for each puzzle in this test has been a key parameter for the success of this test. I would always vote for something that a player knows as his target, rather than bonus for top-50 or bonus based on n*top player's time which players don't know when they start solving.

motris' rank2.xlsx captures all the points logically and can be used in future marathons. It might sound complicated when someone reads first time, but for those who are not interested in details, it simply means "you get bonus if you solve within 60 minutes".
Yes, Samurai sort of breaks the scoring. But it is part of organizers' responsibility to have puzzles based on the scoring system in place.

I guess this system solves many scoring ambiguities. I think the only scenario that is not captured is a TVC V like scenario, where one player is far superior than the rest. Isn't it possible to implement a system that is similar to the LMI Ranking score. There part of the rating is based on ranking and part on actual score, with the top score being 1000. So a system based part on ranking and part of actual time, where the fastest time is a set bonus and 60 minutes is 0 bonus and the rest is scaled.

I think the most annoying part of these grading systems is that you have no clue how you stand opposed to others when you're done solving and your relative rank will shift constantly. You can be ahead of someone when you're done solving and behind them when the test ends. This will especially affect people in the middle I think. I assume there's people in the middle who will try competing against eachother a bit too and they will have no clue if they beat their friend in this test or not till days after they are done. At least I always like to see how I have done against players who are close to me on the LMI rank when i'm done solving.

Edited by Para 2012-02-05 5:17 PM

motris - 2012-02-05 3:22 AM

I've now gone ahead and played with the scoring model and tried the 150 for 1st, 149 for 2nd, 148 for 3rd, down to 100 for 51st through last finisher.

I dont think this system is too fair if somebody win a round with 6 minutes apart ;)

I propose that first position is 50 points bonus, and this is the base of the calculation of bonus points/minute.

For instance if the first's solving time 10 minutes then every minute is 1 point.
If the solving time 15 minutes then 50/45=1,11

So if the puzzle is too easy the bonus will be lower than 1, but in generally it will be higher than 1, in extreme cases it can be almost 2.

Every player still know that if he solves the puzzle within one hour, he gets bonus (and the bonus will be 1-1.5 in most cases).

Regarding the Different Neighbours puzzle, it's also doable if you miss the uniqueness (I did). I've recorded a possible start . The notes are kind of hard to make out, but you should be able to follow the solve.

In all my struggles with the Different Neighbors puzzle(I took a certain part as correct which was wrong and kept thinking the mistake is elsewhere), I found about 3-4 openings of different complexities. The easiest one is what Deb mentioned but there are other tricks there. I guess if one wants to stare at it and start over about 5 times like I ended up doing, they'll find all of them :\

Para - 2012-02-05 4:16 AM]
Isn't it possible to implement a system that is similar to the LMI Ranking score.

Yes, and I think you've given a great idea for how this system would look, with half of bonus scaling by time and half being flat based on rank. That seems perfectly appropriate for an LMI test comparing 10 puzzles just as it works over the year for comparing 10 LMI tests with each other.

Of course, all systems have problems. The scoring of the Marathon test is a huge outlier compared to the normal monthly tests with time bonus, so it is not a good test for the overall rankings as it raises almost everyone more than usual. In this test, the scoring of three of the puzzles led to much less bonus than the other seven. So we are proposing possibilities to address these issues. I don't think there is any dominant answer here, but there are better and worse approaches and it is good to hear from many solvers and aim for better next time.

Para - 2012-02-05 4:16 AM]
I think the most annoying part of these grading systems is that you have no clue how you stand opposed to others when you're done solving and your relative rank will shift constantly.

Well, this is sort of a problem on all tests (as your rank will only ever fall) but with variable scoring there could indeed be small rank changes when solvers are at values where they are "effectively tied". I don't think anyone can cleanly claim victory when things are this close (like when I beat Ulrich by 1 second!) but the rank score will eventually favor one over the other. My sense though is that these effects will be rather small, as they were during Puzzle Jackpot when final scoring wasn't known until all solvers had completed. I could do subsampling analysis to be sure, but I think using rank and not time you will have greater stability. And until results are finalized, you can always just use relative performance for "bragging rights".

"I beat you on 6 of 10 puzzles!"
"Yes, but I beat you by 5 minutes overall!"

Like many things in sports, there aren't always winners but there is always debate.

rob - 2012-02-06 12:25 AM

Regarding the Different Neighbours puzzle, it's also doable if you miss the uniqueness (I did). I've recorded a possible start . The notes are kind of hard to make out, but you should be able to follow the solve.

Wow. Thanks for that video... I now have a better understanding of how to make limiting assumptions on possibilities. Seeing the thought process unfold just made it click :)

Really this is looking interesting. I have never seen such kind of game. I would like to participate in this amazing and different game. I like such kind of things really. And i think this would be knowledgeable. So any one can tell me how i can be the part of this game.