Ah, I missed some of those chain reactions on the right of the Domino Nurikabe... followed your Liar Slitherlink path almost exactly though.

On effort: there's not enough of the right kind of data to say anything certain about this, but here's two quick bits from my own opinions:
1. There's little to gain and a lot to lose by believing yourself incapable of reaching a certain level.
2. "If you do lots of puzzles, you get better" is wrong wrong wrong. After solving a puzzle, you must stop and think hard about all the things that you were slow on or that you missed entirely. Figure out how to not screw up the same ways again. I never made any nontrivial improvements without doing this.

Edited by MellowMelon 2013-05-23 9:19 AM

First of all, let me say the contest puzzles are, without exception, cool. Like, seriously cool. There is a surprising, and most welcome, rarity of workmanlike steps. Also, lots of big picture thinking. Congratulations.

Far as format goes: Instant grading is always nice; personally, it helped me eventually reread keying instructions I had radically misunderstood. Scoring was, in a word, unfun. Grouping bonuses are only useful in railroading a solver's path through the test, which can in no way make a contest more enjoyable. Page formating was a mixed bag. I liked the instruction column, but some grids felt cramped. I was particularly annoyed with Skyscrapers. Timing, well, let's just say this was no exception to my usual pattern of losing quite a few points by a few seconds. In this case, 70pts for 10 seconds.

'"If you do lots of puzzles, you get better" is wrong wrong wrong.' is kinda wrong in my experience. When you are first starting puzzles, disentangling things into digestible bits is a tall order. And later on, practice does make perfect. Locating the things I was looking for became a whole lot faster and more efficient with experience. Which is not to say that stop and think after the solve is not excellent advice: I have puzzle books filled with side notes on whatever caught my eye in that puzzle. I find the process of putting stuff to paper commits them to memory. And much longer notes on puzzles where I had to brute-force things the first time around. I'll admit that staring at a completed puzzle may not be everyone's idea of fun though. Another way of marked improvement is simply reading or seeing solutions and chat about particular puzzles, which occasionally happens across the many puzzle blogs around. Some times you'll pick up notation, and sometimes logical attack strategies you hadn't yet formulated. Again, to some this will feel like cheating.

Setting reasonable personal targets in competition settings may help with motivation, provided you keep them tight as you improve. For example, I currently tend to consider things under 33% of top score a failure, and gun for 40%. This wasn't always so, and the goalposts will be moved if keep scoring with ease. But, hey, "There are worlds without bridges to them." wins on style alone.

About group bonuses, I do think that they aren't that fitting in this test. But well, everything has been settled before I realized this, so, yeah. It's mostly to allow solvers to plan how they do the puzzles in order to maximize the bonuses.

I should have made Skyscrapers' grid larger. I'm too much used to binary and loop puzzles that I aim to make smaller grids (so that more can fit on the same page; it's wasteful if the PB has 18 pages IMO).

Thanks!

Thanks for the interesting walk through's for Nurikabe and Slitherlink. Learned some interesting new things!

I am still struggling with the second kropki skyscraper. Can someone write a few lines about the critical steps for this puzzle as well?

Thanks in advance!

It's somewhat trial and error at rows 2 and 6, or at least that's the best path I've found so far. I'll provide a walkthrough ASAP.

Heh, apparently not as terrible as I thought. Skyscrapers Kropki (Bottom)

Edited by chaotic_iak 2013-06-03 9:09 PM

Thanks a lot for this walkthrough. Much less T&E than I expected, so I learned a few interesting elimination steps again!