I had a blast with this one. It was one of the few times I've felt like I actually had a chance (albeit a small one) to claim a time bonus. H gave me trouble, as did O; the rest of the smaller ones seemed to flow pretty well, and didn't hang me up too long. I will admit to using uniqueness logic at a couple of points, and I'd have preferred to find the purely logical path, but hey, clock's ticking! :)

The bigger one definitely had me stumped for longer than I would have liked, and my ten or so minutes remaining wasn't nearly enough for me to solve it. Unfortunately, I had to do a little trial and error to figure that one out; I may try to revisit it later to see what I missed, but I just couldn't find a good way to start linking up the edge bits that came in easily, or to even really get started in the middle. Making a couple of well placed assumptions, I eventually massaged it into shape, but I want to figure out how that one ticks.

Great fun, regardless; I've never felt Masyu was a very strong category for me, but this assortment of puzzles (and preparing for them) have really helped me feel like I've got a stronger grasp of it now. Right up until a variant gets thrown at me next time. ;)

Thanks Ravi!
I REALLY enjoyed this comtest.

This is the first time to solve completely on LMI.

Edited by totoron8655 2013-04-26 10:51 PM

Hi Ono san,
I am really glad that you enjoyed my contest. Thanks for your participation.
You get to complete a whole set at LMI, It never happened to me ;(

Regards,
Ravi

Edited by macherlakumar 2013-04-27 7:33 AM

H, I have already mentioned so regarding O, it starts with very easy steps, only the top right 2 black circles are crucial to finish it.
Using uniqueness logic, in my opinion it is not a bad idea, I do use it sometimes, but that would be my last option.
some people may be good at one puzzle type so contests like this are perfect way to show their skills
Thanks for your particiaption.

Regards,
Ravi

It was a great contest. Few puzzles where very tricky and i did took time there. Did some mistake while solving the big one but fortunately found the mistake immediately.
For the first time ever i was able to grab the bonus. Thanks for the great puzzles. Njoyed a lot :) .

Happy to hear that you enjoyed the contest
Yes few puzzles are tricky else there won't be any fun, right ?
Thanks for your participation.

Regards,
Ravi

Edited by macherlakumar 2013-04-27 4:24 PM

With my competitive hat on, I really ought to have been at least 10 minutes quicker... I tripped myself up on A E and H - stupidly the thing with H was not the nice configuration with 4 black circles, which is the sort of thing I also save for harder puzzles (actually, you only need 2 black circles and white to set up that trick).

I didn't solve the big puzzle remotely cleanly - I'll have to try solving again to see if there was a more pleasing solution. Was the idea to fiddle around with the loop section from the middle-left to top-left and work from there?

I think of the set, M was my favourite - although the standard overall was pretty good! If I was really nitpicking I'd say maybe some of the puzzles were a little tough for a beginner, but otherwise a really fun race against the clock!

This was constructed at my early days as a puzzle designer. I felt using 4 black would be good and did so.
Middle-left to top-left is one part and then you have to work on the center.
M is very nice design although I could have put a white circle at R10C5 to make it symmetrical, but that would decrease the difficulty. I am happy that you liked the overall standard.
Since the idea is still in trail phase, depending on this competition the future Beginners' puzzle competitions may be changed.

Regards,
Ravi

I don't know why, but I feel like the puzzles are somewhat repetitive. There are just so many tricks that are used over and over. Well, perhaps it's due to the fact that I solved it when half-asleep, so I can't quite remember things...heh.

Nice puzzles and contest!

The simple entry format (easy to count, not prone to errors) was a real pleasure.

The beginner sudoku contest format, with two short 40 min segments and a break between segments, is nice. That would also have been nice here (select 2 groups of puzzles, even though the rules are the same). For that matter, I'd be happy to see multiple shorter segments even in non-beginner contests :)

Enjoyed the puzzles. I also found H to be hard. I resorted to uniqueness logic in various puzzles several times (unsatisfying), and also some guesses (even less satisfying).

I do most of my masyu solving on nikoli. Overall these puzzles seemed on the hard side, especially for a beginner contest. I notice several beginners have already placed well. Congratulations!

This contest taught me quite a bit more about Masyu patterns. Well done.

Had my internet not cut out temporarily, I think I would have finished sometime around the 68-minute mark, as opposed to the 74-and-a-half-minute mark. I really need to have a word with my ISP about these problems.

Not prone to errors? And I missed one empty cell at one time... Either I have to use a thicker brush or this claim is not exactly correct.

A method that I think more error-proof is to count the numbers of horizontal line segments in the rows instead. Should be fairly easy to count too, and more visible...I don't know.

Perhaps another method would be placing the arrows so they point along gridlines, and count the number of times the line is cut. This way, it also serves as a double-check; because there must be an even number of cuts, if you get an odd result then you know something is wrong, and it should be really visible. But this method gives the same answer a rather large portion of the time, so it might not be able to check some incorrectly solved areas.

...Answer key problem. Always one of the most bugging problems for test makers. That said, this choice is fairly nice too; only that it's still more error-prone than what is expected.

Disagree. Counting the empty cells is probably the easiest answer format ever. This was the best puzzle contest for me from the view of submiting answers. I really apreciate this idea and hope that there will be more contests with such an easy and clear answer format.

Edited by greenhorn 2013-04-29 7:08 PM

Probably not. This has been used in multiple tests after 2011. Each and every time, I have seen players claiming they made a typo.

Thanks Ravi for the great puzzles. Enjoyed all the puzzles. For me I made mistake twice while solving L. Only third time I could find my mistake. Thanks to LMI for this great initiative.

Congratulations to: All of Japan! Currently in the top 9 places - Sugoi!

Many thanks to Ravi, great set of puzzles.
I like the answer keys. Counting 5 digits is quick enough.
I would have prefered the points for each puzzle to be printed too.

Even the easy 4 were still "clever" puzzles.
I was wondering if this test could be given to people that are new to puzzling, but I think not. A little experience in Masyu is still needed.

It is perfect 10 now.

Classic Masyu Contest is over now.

Password removed from puzzle booklet, and solutions appended. Link

Thank you for the solutions. It helped a lot in identifying my mistakes.

Though I have know this site for long, I had never participated in the past. This is my first attempt at Masyu and I cannot believe that I spent 3 days in learning Masyu for his event. This Monthly puzzle really helped me get back to puzzles.

Thank you for organizing the events on regular basis. Please do keep posting more and more puzzles in the near future.

Some thoughts on the first Beginners' Puzzle Contest -

Ravi is a relatively new author, and he approached us a few months ago about holding a Masyu contest. We've been wanting to hold Beginners' Puzzle Contests for a while now, so thought we'd merge both ideas and build from here.

In hindsight, its probably not an ideal setting for Beginners, because of the quantity and partly because of the difficulty of a few of the puzzles, but with the Beginners' feature of extra time, there was at least enough incentive for everyone to carry on solving.

On the positive side though, it turned out to be a sprint that everyone who participated seems to have enjoyed, which I think is mainly due to the nice quality of puzzles in the set. Thanks Ravi, and I hope you enjoyed the experience of authoring the first Beginners' Puzzle Contest.

As for the competitors, congrats to Joo M. Y (South Korea), apollo1001 (UK) and foxfirex (USA) for topping the Beginners' standings. As for Seasoners, that is some serious Japan domination there. Congrats to the top 3 of deu, EKBM and nyuta. Kudos to all 11 of you in the top 11, and also to Anderson (USA), Muhorka (Slovakia) and Semax (Germany) for being the "best of the rest".

In future, we will have changes to the format of Beginners' puzzle contests, and you can all definitely expect more of them to come in tandem with the Beginners' sudoku contests.

Thank you all for participating!

I actually printed out the puzzles just for the fun of it and I also never had tried Masyu before. Then I started to solve the puzzles and thought it was great fun! It was very simple to see easy strategies you can use in every puzzle at the beginning. Thank you for these puzzles. I think it's very hard to find puzzles that are easy but nice and it's also very hard to find them on the internet in their usual form when they're not a variation or two puzzle types in one. I enjoyed it very much (and still am, since I didn't solve all) and hope I will like the next test as much or even more than this one. I think this is a really good way to get people to enjoy ALL puzzle types and not just sudoku.

Hi,
The puzzles do not have individual points, points are given depending on the number of puzzles solved (order of solve does not matter).

Regards,
Ravi

This was a fun contest for me, with nice puzzles, stellar submission mechanics and a great scoring scheme. In fact, I probably had too much fun; the bright and eager novices in my puzzle community would have suffered rather early on. Ending the contest on a larger grid is an excellent idea, but this one was far, far too hard for the stated purpose, and completely demoralising for actual (as opposed to site) novices. Maybe renaming future contests in this mould to "intermediate" would be best.

I thought the last puzzle was quite senseless for a "Beginners contest". I bifurcated twice and just couldn't be bothered with it.

First of all thanks to everyone for your participation and making this a huge success.

Few months back I have approached Deb for authoring a Masyu contest, at that time I am still new to puzzle construction. Deb and Prasanna looked at my puzzles and gave many suggestions on how to make puzzles that fit into competitions, because many of them are completely symmetrical (solving one half was enough to complete the puzzle). Many weeks have passed and I have designed 20 puzzles along with one 20X20 grid.
I have sent all the puzzles to Deb and he tested them and said they are good to go for competition but then again the number was an issue, after some discussion I have convinced them for 16 grids (10X10) and one 20X20 grid.
Out of the 4 rejected puzzles one I used for the instructions booklet and one found a good place which will be revealed in 3-4 months :)

I have to thank Branko for taking time from his busy schedule to test all the puzzles just few days before the start of Serbian GP. The answer format credit goes to Branko, who has come up with the idea of number of blank cells.

Deb and Prasanna helped me a lot, they always provided quick support to me. I am really happy to work with Deb and Prasanna.

I enjoyed a lot looking at almost everyone solving times. I never expected this contest to become this successful, mainly because I am new to puzzle construction. Many people have solved all 17 puzzles and I got the feeling that many are happy with the contest, which is what I wished for.

Stay tuned for another Classic Masyu Contest :D

Regards,
Ravi