With a strong performance at WPC last year, Prasanna Seshadri receives a wild card for the Indian team. He will be joining the other top players from IPC at representing India in World Puzzle Championship.

Also, Prasanna will be organizing IPC this year.

Awesome!
A much awaited event. :)

Similar to the Indian Sudoku Championship, I'll be referring to the previous years' formats to gain some perspective. However, I do have a few small changes in mind for the Puzzle Championship. I'd like to say right at the start that we'd love to hear feedback after the Championship. Our dual goal is clear (here as well as in ISC) - Select the best possible Indian team for the World Championships, and have enough in the Championship for a beginner to enjoy and use as a base to improve for future years. So that means all solvers can provide some relevant feedback.

Anyway, more details will be released soon. As always, feel free to clear your doubts (or learn the logic for puzzle types that are newer to you) here using the practice sets the opening post has linked to. I can't say yet whether or not those types will appear in the Championships, but sharpening your logical skills in general always helps.

This competition will be used to determine the Indian Puzzle Champion for the year 2014.

It'll also be used to select the National Puzzle team which will be invited to represent India at the World Puzzle Championships, 2014, in UK. Here is the website to know more about this event - http://www.uk2014.org/ . The top 3 Indians in the Indian Puzzle Championship will be invited to join me on the team.

Also, please check the FAQ if you're new to the site, the contest norms are given there.

Prasanna sir, a lot of doubt are still there.
1. can i give this test from home?
2. what if my internet stop working in between?
3. or will you prefer any cyber cafe?
4. Creating a login account here = registration?
5. How will I know the registration process is complete? :(

Hi,
1. Yes of course. You can give it from anywhere with a stable internet connection.
2. Thats a risk for everyone unfortunately, and we just need to put that thought aside and hope for the best.
3. More than my preference, its better to see your preference. Since last year's contest was 2 and a half hours long, and this year's format is similar, I'd think it'll be difficult to do this at a cafe. But you need to print the PDF once you start the test, so the only advisable thing would be to have a printer nearby when you're starting.
4. Yes. You may need to login using your account id and password on the submission page. But you are already registered.
5. (answered by 4)

In general, I suggest you try out the Beginners' Contests starting tomorrow on this site (see top right). As far as starting the test, printing it out, submitting keys, and hoping the internet connection stays stable, this is a good way to learn how an online contest works. The puzzles will also be a good way to practice and improve your skills a little, of course

as i have faced this situation early i can suggest you one thing. If there is a risk that your internet will get disconnect or so. Then i can guarantee cyber cafe is safe place to deal with. Here is what i did, previous day i talked to the cyber cafe person for keeping me a place next day at that particular time i.e. 3 hrs and asked to keep his printer connection on etc. basically everything set before contest begins.

Hope this helps.

Well international participants have flexible time, like with last year?

Yes. The test will be extended for International participants similar to last year.
Just to be clear again, Indian participants will only be considered for the official IPC rankings if they compete within the allotted time (which will be announced).

Hi I am here

Hi
welcome
You can post any queries over here, someone will answer as soon as possible :)
Hope you will enjoy the contest :)

hello everyone
i couldn't find the Beginners' Contests for IPC as mentioned by prasanna sir. please help
also please suggest how to prepare for IPC 2014

Hi Arun. The Beginners Puzzle contest for this month is over. You can check out the following links.

Past Contests in LMI - Sudoku and Puzzles including Beginners contests -- http://logicmastersindia.com/lmitests/downloads.asp

This month Beginners Puzzle contest puzzle booklet will be uploaded in the above link. Till then you can check out the below link directing you to the Contest Page which has the Instruction Booklets and Puzzle Booklets.

http://logicmastersindia.com/BeginnersPuzzle/201405/?round=1

Adding to what Varun has said, the first post of the thread has links to previous year IPCs, which should help.

Small note on the instructions: The Tetromino Division sample puzzle uses 'S', while the list of tetrominos has 'Z'.

Interesting set of types, looking forward to this.

Nice set of puzzles. Looking forward to it.

I could not understand fully Torodial Slitherlinks. e.g. Where top left corner end is wrapping around? and how we are able to complete the loop?

It wraps around both ways. So the left most column of dots and the right most column of dots are really the same column. The same goes for the top most row of dots and the bottom most row of dots. From this we can also get that all corner dots are really the same dot.

Few practice links -
http://puzzleparasite.blogspot.in/2011/09/puzzle-2-slitherlinktoroi...

http://puzzleparasite.blogspot.in/2011/09/double-trouble-1-slitherl...

Thanks for pointing this out. It has been fixed.

In Spirally as ABC should the order be A-B-C-D from the inside or from the outside?

According to the example in the IB it's from outside, which is also consistent with most spiral puzzles (put letters from outside).

Its from the outside (The open cell) to the inside, as the example shows.

Some practice for Cross the Streams - http://www.gmpuzzles.com/blog/category/cross-the-streams/

For Tetromino Division, the Beginners' Contest authored by Serkan should be helpful - http://logicmastersindia.com/lmitests/?test=B2014032

Pentomino Division is basically the Pentominous from GMP - http://www.gmpuzzles.com/blog/?s=pentominous

Maximal Lengths was on the recent Puzzle GP - http://gp.worldpuzzle.org/content/wpf-puzzle-gp4 (Both Instruction Booklet example and the competition puzzle should be useful).

For Observer Battleships, you can scroll down to puzzle number 12 here - http://puzzleparasite.blogspot.in/2012/11/13th-24-hour-puzzle-champ...

For some of the base types, me and Swaroop had collaborated for a practice set last year with some basic solving tips, which can be seen here - http://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/ipc-preview-practi...

TomTom and Coded TomTom were both in IPC 2012, which is linked to in the opening post.

If others know more helpful links, feel free to post.

Hi All,
I have created a Tiki Tour puzzle for practice.

Regards,
Ravi





Attachments
----------------
Tiki Tour.png (12KB - 7 downloads)

Nice puzzle :)
Thanks.

Good Puzzle Ravi. Thanks for sharing it.

Below is a link to a demo page. This demo page is mainly for newcomers who want to do a test run of how the system works for an online competition. You may check the different warning messages you will get for each answer key too.

http://logicmastersindia.com/2014/IPC_Demo/

In Battleship Observer, does a numbered cell count as empty cell for other numbered cells?

It will be counted as empty as clear from example (count numbers for 6 in example to understand and clear your doubt).

Yes.

Note: Pentominous doesn't have the restriction that each region can contain at most one letter, which the competition puzzle, Pentomino Division, does (as mentioned in the Instruction Booklet). Other than this, there's no change.

For the Tom Tom puzzle does operations division and subtractions apply if the group is having more than two cells? If yes, then I assume that operator will be applied in decreasing order.

Yes. And yes.

A little information about the authors -

Thomas Snyder and Grant Fikes are both from the USA, and are regular authors on Grandmaster Puzzles, where I am a contributing author too. You can find out more about them here and here. I have previously linked to some of the puzzles on this site, in this thread as practice, but you will find many other Classic puzzle types there too to practice for the weekend competition, like Nurikabe, Slitherlink, TomTom, Star Battle, Battleships, Araf, etc. I highly recommend the site for high quality puzzles in general.

Bram de Laat is from the Netherlands, and has a blog called Para's Puzzle Site. I have linked to a few puzzles that can be used from his blog too, but here too there are some great puzzles across a variety of types. There should be some helpful classics here too. Also, I recommend viewing the Slitherlink solving tips post by Bram, discussing patterns that are helpful in solving this puzzle type.

James McGowan is from New Zealand, but competes in the UK team internationally. He has been on "double duty" for this weekend, what with also being the main author for the UK Puzzle GP. He doesn't have his own blog, but has contributed puzzles to the UKPA forum, the German Puzzle Portal, and the upcoming Art of Puzzles book (by GM Puzzles). He's been quite helpful as one of the test solvers too.

There are contributions from the Organizers too, namely me and Deb Mohanty. Since you're already on LMI if you're reading this, Deb's basically the person who runs the site, and has also authored many contests here, including multiple National Championships. I have my own blog, but I'm not nearly as active as I used to be. My recent efforts, apart from writing puzzles for GM Puzzles and the recent Monthly Tests on LMI, have gone into starting a Patronage system for LMI. While the Championship is free, if you enjoy our contests, and want to give something back, please check it out.

Also, thanks to all the Test Solvers:

James McGowan, as mentioned above.
Bastien Vial-Jaime from France.
Vladimir Portugalov from Belarus.
Tiit Vunk from Estonia.

in Tiki Tour, can a tent belong to 2 trees? In other words, can 2 trees have only a single tent that is adjacent to both trees?

Each tree must have its "own" tent.

Word Nurikabe: Can the two or more given letters be part of same word? I assume that answer is yes as instructions does not restrict it. Please do clarify if possible.

Will this become restricted forum after test begins like other monthly tests ?

Yes.

ok
Best of luck to all :)

All the best :)

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

I really should not do the test when tired. Wasted a huge amount of time on the easy questions.

By the way, only my score is showing on the scoreboard, while everyone else gets 0 points. Is that normal?

Edited by achan1058 2014-05-25 4:59 PM

For now, yes. We're working on the incorrect submissions to release the proper official results.

Did the Instructions Booklet (IB) provide enough information about participating in IPC?	Yes, mostly.
Did you understand the puzzle rules, examples and answer keys from the IB?	I understood all of them.
Did you find enough easy puzzles to solve during the championship?	Yes, there were many of them.
After your experience in IPC, are you going to participate in future championshiops or contests at LMI?	Most likely

The rules of the every puzzle should be listed in bullet form.

Each bullet point should have one and only one restriction of the puzzle mentioned in it.

Currently, one instruction statement of the puzzle has multiple restrictions mentioned in it (or all the rules are described in a paragraph format) - increasing the probability of a new-comer to miss one of the multiple restrictions.
(Anyway, some of the statements in the instructions are complicated/convoluted for new comers.
So breaking the instruction statement down into individual bullet points, with one rule per bullet point will make it clearer to new-comers)

= = = =

While the participants are supposed to read the rules very carefully, but it does help if the same are listed in bullet-wise fashion so that the solvers (especially new-comers and non-regular-puzzle-solvers) don't miss any facet of the puzzle.

It also makes it easier for non-regular solvers to validate the answers upon submission - by checking against each bullet point.

Edited by rajibrborah 2014-05-25 5:24 PM

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

Thanks for this feedback. These are very good points. We'll consider them in the future.

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

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

Congratulations to all winners.

Congrats Amit for winning the title. Congrats Rohan too.
Finally feeling happy, break through after missing from past 3 years.
Will give detailed comment about test later.

Thanks for awesome puzzles to all authors. Thanks to Deb and Prasanna for organizing so well.

Firstly thanks to the organizers and authors for a wonderful test.

Congrats to Amit, Rohan and Swaroop.
Swaroop finally made it no more close miss this time :D

Thanks and Regards,
Ravi

I have a query in A2 Match the following puzzle. I have submitted the answer as ZYWX and I haven't got any points for that.

I arrived at the result as follows:
2 + 3 x 6 / 9 = 4
4 x 5 / 2 - 7 = 3
5 x 3 - 9 / 6 = 1
6 / 2 + 7 - 8 = 2

What is the right answer?

Edited by megu 2014-05-25 6:18 PM

Without releasing right answer yet, I'll give you a chance to solve it yourself. You've missed the rule that operator precedence is followed, i.e., Multiplication and division are done before addition and subtraction. So your equation for 1 will actually become 15 - 1.5, not 6/6.

-
-
-
-
-
-
-

5 x 3 - 9 / 6 is (5 x 3) - (9/6) = 15-(3/2) = 13.5

Regards,
Ravi

Edited by debmohanty 2014-05-25 7:44 PM

Equation 3 is wrong, since you need to respect the order of operations, which gets you 13.5.

Edited by achan1058 2014-05-25 6:25 PM

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

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

Some grids were too large. Everything else was great. Thanks for the puzzles :)

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

Oh! I get it now! How silly of me!

I applied the operator precedence rule in other 3 parts and failed at one part.

I solved it now, I hope I have got it right this time:
2 + 3 x 6 / 9 = 4
4 - 5 x 2 + 7 = 1
5 - 3 / 9 x 6 = 3
6 / 2 + 7 - 8 = 2

I will have to keep in mind to re-check everything before submission for future contests, however few puzzles I am able to finish.

Thank you for the reply. Also thanks to the other two people who replied.

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

Did the Instructions Booklet (IB) provide enough information about participating in IPC?	Yes, mostly.
Did you understand the puzzle rules, examples and answer keys from the IB?	I understood all of them.
Did you find enough easy puzzles to solve during the championship?	No, there were really few easy puzzles.
After your experience in IPC, are you going to participate in future championshiops or contests at LMI?	Most likely

Congrats to all the winners.
Well Done Amit with great performance.

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

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

In E1 Star battle my logic went like this.

1. Every region need to have 6 stars.
2. At C2 there must be a stars.
3. The same region holds 2 stars at column A and D.
4. So one star must be at B or C9.
5. The other small region holds 2 stars at column F and H.
6. One star at G 5/6/7.
7. One at I 2/3.
But i wasted hell of time and could not finish the puzzle. Can any one guide me were I went wrong.

You haven't gone wrong anywhere so far, but you can reduce things more. Remember that there can be only one star for each 2x2 area of cells. Dividing the "K" shape into this distribution helps - 1 star in I23/H3. 1 star in H34. 1 star in F34. One star in F56/G56. One star in F78. One star in H78. (G7 cannot be a star because you need 2 stars in F78/G7/H78 and this will contradict things). You should be able to reduce it further from here.

I'm embarrassed, but I have no idea how the matching rule was supposed to work for A4. Can someone put me out of my misery?

G6 also cannot hold a star. If we place a star at G6, F8 and H8 must hold a star, this restricts placing any star between E9 and I9. Is this logic correct.

No, you can still fit 2 stars in the remaining 4 cells of the row, A/D9 and B/C9. You can reduce it elsewhere on the K.

Hint: What are the images made up of?

Congrats Amit, Rohan and Swaroop for the Podium finish. All the Best for the WPC. :-)

Hmmm, my first time ever having a time bonus :) I think someone mistakenly configured the scoring page so that solving 26 puzzles would give a time bonus, but solving more wouldn't :-) Apart from that, great puzzles!
Denis

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	I have a different complaint

Very nice puzzles!

My only complaint is with Coded TomTom puzzle (C3). Symbol for division looks very similar to plus symbol. Maybe next time using / symbol for division might be better.

Edited by Gotroch 2014-05-26 1:17 PM

Did the Instructions Booklet (IB) provide enough information about participating in IPC?	Yes, mostly.
Did you understand the puzzle rules, examples and answer keys from the IB?	I understood most of them.
After your experience in IPC, are you going to participate in future championshiops or contests at LMI?	Most likely

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

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

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

Wow, that was bad.
Puzzles I broke:
B2, D1, D3, E1 twice, H1, I2, J1 three times, J2, J3 twice, L1 (14 breaks, using logic? I must be dead)
Missed: B2, D3, H1, I2, K3, K2, L2

Fixed.

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

Hey everyone,

Solutions will be released soon after the last International participants finish the test.

On a related note, since I haven't yet explicitly stated details associating puzzles to authors, you all can go ahead and guess in replies here, if you want, for fun.

Hints: Me, James, Bram each contributed 3 of the 13 sections. Thomas/Grant contributed 3 together with Thomas writing the variants where applicable. Deb contributed 1 section.

The Indian Puzzle Championship is now officially over even for the International participants.

The Solutions booklet can be downloaded here . Congrats to uvo, EKBM and deu, the International Top 3. Ulrich was the only one to finish all 35 puzzles correctly, with 12 minutes to go.

I hope everyone enjoyed the puzzles. Congrats once again to the Official winners Amit, Rohan and Swaroop. I'll give you all a day to guess the authors and post my notes about puzzle selection, etc. tomorrow. In the meantime, please feel free to ask for hints on individual puzzles and also to give more feedback on the competition in general.

Thank you all for participating!

My guess for authors:
Thomas/Grant - C,D,F
Prasanna - I,G,E
Deb -A
Bram - B,L,K
James - J,M,H

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

I really liked the test, but I have one thing to consider.

"Match the following" is a guessing puzzle. My personal view is, that there should be no guessing puzzles in a logic puzzle test. Especially when one thinks about that A2 was too guessy even for the puzzle makers, so they gave the rules for it. Which means, "a little guessy" is ok, or what? Why do we give all the rules to all the other puzzles then anyway?

First, thanks for the thoughts. This is an interesting take on "Match the Following" because the purpose to include that is to interest participants who are new to logic puzzles and might want some familiar ground. I can see where you're coming from as these in general won't follow a "solve path" as some of the common logic puzzles, but they do not require guessing either. It can sometimes be an intuitive solve, as are many other logic puzzles.

A1 was simple equations, A2 is basically another iteration of Simple Math. The rules were given because the rules were given in the Instruction booklet too. When equations are there, "precedence" and "repeating" are common clarifications, and are such in Simple Math too which is a common logic puzzle. Out of curiosity, would you call TomTom a guessing puzzle? Because A2 is an easier version of that with digits given and without the Latin Square rule.

A4 and A5 were instructionless puzzles which are a common enough occurrence in Logic Puzzle competitions. The logic there is in thinking what the association could be. Its intuitive, but I wouldn't call it guesswork, because there's enough there to make something out of. Counting puzzles have been present in WPCs before, and Elastic Bands definitely didn't require guesswork, its a simple case of spotting the vertices.

Did the Instructions Booklet (IB) provide enough information about participating in IPC?	Yes, mostly.
Did you understand the puzzle rules, examples and answer keys from the IB?	I understood all of them.
Did you find enough easy puzzles to solve during the championship?	Yes, there were many of them.
After your experience in IPC, are you going to participate in future championshiops or contests at LMI?	Most likely

A,B,I - Prasanna
C,F,H - Thomas and Grant
G - Deb
E,L,J - James
D,K,M - Bram

Regards,
Ravi

I want to share the way I did A2. Let's see whether anyone else uses the same method...

I simply make a table for all possibilities. Like, A can only go to Y or Z (if I recall correctly), etc. Now, for each equation:

Note that operations may not be repeated in an equation. So I began by trying where the division goes, if any. This usually makes some other multiplication sign forced, and there are only two more possibilities.

After that, I tried putting the multiplication sign. As there's no more division, the multiplication occasionally blows up the result, so there aren't many ways for this to go either.

After tabulating, just do a Latin Square thingy to pick one from each equation and one from each result.

I took about 2-3 minutes here, so giving 20 points here is interesting...

---

Regarding Match the Following, the three puzzles with instructions aren't guessing at all; they are simply usual puzzles taking in a different form of matching. A4 and A5 are more inductive, as in there's no set rules and in some way you can interpret things differently, but they only worth 10 points and IPC in some way is different from usual monthly puzzle tests due to this: having inductive puzzles.

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

Swaroop - 7/13.
Ravi - 5/13.

Notes about Puzzle Selection -

In general, I wanted to cover all the broad common categories for the IPC, like Number Placement, shading, loops, object placement and region division. However, along the way, I had in mind the fact that I should attempt to cover the lesser known categories as well with the variants, and remaining sections.

A - Since the Match The Following has already been talked about, I'll get to the remaining ones. A quick note once again that the A section is mainly to provide a familiar easy start for participants who are newcomers to logic puzzle competitions. I thank Deb for handling this Section, and I think the idea to keep two questions instruction-less was a great idea, to cover this kind of "figure out what to do" thinking, that is definitely necessary in the WPC.

B & C - This is the Number Placement section. I wanted Easy As ABC or Skyscrapers, to cover the conceptual part of things, which James took up. In general, I wanted the rules to have simple changes for most of the variants, so his Spiral variant suggestion was perfect both in this sense and in the fact that the spiral grid variation is a different kind of thinking that got covered here. I wanted a math number placement puzzle too. I could think of Kakuro but had totally forgotten TomTom actually, until Thomas suggested it, and I thought it was perfect because it had some Sudoku logic which is familiar to most of the target audience, and at the same time covered the Math portion of things. Coded TomTom as a variant meant that Cipher/substitution logic was covered well too. The bigger TomTom here was one I really liked personally, and both me and chaotic iak noted that this was a bit different from Grant's usual constructions.

D & E - This is the Object placement section. Bram contributed the Battleships, and had actually sent in a harder Observer variant at the start, which is an excellent puzzle that should appear online elsewhere in the future. The bigger classic Battleships puzzle was hard too but I let that stay because on balance I liked that some classics be hard. I wrote the Star Battles, and since we had a 9x9 with 6 regions last year (which I totally predicted in the practice puzzle set I had released ), I wanted to do something similar, but with different calculations. 9x9 with 3 regions worked well, but then I was wondering what I could fit in with 3 regions, seeing as that would only accommodate 2 letters. At this point I already had the 2014 themed normal Star Battle ready, so I just went with a "UK" theme since that's where the WPC is in 2014. It surprised a few testers

F & G - This is the Shading puzzles section. Thomas and Grant contributed to both F & G. Since shading and loops are common types, I wanted each section to have one common puzzle and one uncommon puzzle with easily understandable rules. Cross the Streams was perfect to fit the uncommon puzzle type with Nurikabe being the common one. Since CTS was uncommon, I thought two classics would be enough here. With Nurikabe, by the time Thomas had agreed to write the variant, I knew what the other authors were doing already, so I wanted word puzzle logic to be covered somewhere. A Word Nurikabe seemed the best bet, and Thomas sent in a very impressive puzzle using Indian states, as can be seen.

H & I - This is the Region Division section. The Division puzzles are mine, and I just thought that since "Pentomino thinking" is slightly different from "Tetromino thinking", one of each should do well here. The Arafs, and most notably, the highest pointer, the Different Neighbors variant, were contributed by Bram. I wasn't entirely sure whether to include the variant, even though it was my favorite puzzle of the set, because it starts with global logic that might be difficult to see. I requested another variant to choose from, and he was nice enough to send it in, but I still wanted to use the first one, so I decided that if 2 testers solve it in a reasonable time (after I already had), it should be fine to include. This is what happened, and I'm happy some solvers attempted and solved it, and were able to enjoy it within competition. For those of you willing to try it and looking for a hint - count the 4s.

J & K - This is the Loop section. As I mentioned with shading puzzles, I wanted one common loop type and one uncommon one. Slitherlink was a favorite for the common one because its so easy to understand and also because its there on a few newspapers here in India. Bram suggested the Toroidal variant, and since this covered yet another form of thinking, I loved it, even though I knew the variant in general would be hard. Indeed, here too I requested an easier version after the original Bram sent in (really, there's at least 4 high quality puzzles out there now including an extra Classic Slitherlink that will all appear elsewhere). For the uncommon loop, James suggested Maximal Lengths which had appeared in the 4th Puzzle GP and I liked it. Though I'm not particularly strong at these, I thought its a good fit for the "easy rules" requirement. He then suggested the Minimal Lengths variant which I personally liked for the competition a bit more than Maximal, because it flowed in an easier way (seemingly). There was a hard Maximal Lengths that was discarded in favor of having two Minimal Lengths. The hard one is a really nice puzzle, but had a very narrow path, and James will probably showcase it elsewhere.

L - The Snakes were written by me, and it was only because I thought that the Snake type is a fairly common one which wasn't covered on the set yet.

M - I wanted a special puzzle, but wasn't exactly sure what. James first suggested a connected puzzle with two separate grids, which I was ok with, but eventually he liked Tiki Tours better, and once he submitted it I liked it better too because it covered a double variant and it also had Object Placement and Looping which I consider a bit more common than other categories, except Shading (which kinda sorta got covered by Snake too).

Overall, I was really happy with the set and sincerely thank all the authors for their contributions and the testers for their feedback. I hope everyone had something to attempt in the competition and had fun with it.

Just to summarize -
A - Deb.
B, J, M - James.
C, F, G - Grant/Thomas.
D, I, K - Bram.
E, H, L - me.

Awesome :)
I had one suggestion that for Answer Key of Battleshipts or Star Battle can't numbers be preferred then Alphabets. It's easy to enter numbers than to note down alphabets. would like to here others take on this?

But there are 26 alphabets while only 10 digits. I can see why Prasanna prefers letters; so he doesn't need to deal with "if the column number has two digits, enter the last digit only" and stuffs.

Also Battleships already have digits around the grid. Putting another set of digits might be confusing.

For the Araf variation, it helps to have seen this puzzle from a familiar blog before:

http://www.gmpuzzles.com/blog/2014/05/araf-serkan-yurekli/



Edited by uvo 2014-05-28 10:59 PM

ok got it :)

It was kind of funny actually. I had considered this particular variant before this puzzle had been posted. So after that puzzle was posted any thought of being original quickly disappeared.