The rank bonus seems to cause a big discrepancy in bonus values for rounds with fewer finishers (especially round 4 currently). Shouldn't the bonus just top off from 60 (1st 60, 2nd 59 etc.) unless there are more than 60 finishers?

The rounds were definitely of very different difficulty levels -- all were a lot of fun, I think most people will agree that #2 and especially #4 were harder than #1 and #3. This is par for the course in WPC and all the puzzles were really well designed (though I really played #4 poorly and then got close to not having enough time to finish it before a meeting scheduled for 75 minutes after my start time...). But I do tend to agree with Bram and others that this seems to be to make the bonuses for rounds 2 and 4 quite sensitive to small variations in solving time or even rank. Perhaps this will go away once more people complete all rounds. Or else, it might be something to watch for in future such mini-marathons -- allotting different amount of times to the different rounds might have been better. -- Denis

What was your most favorite round?	Round 3 - Great Wall
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I always hurt my own performance by not sufficiently poring over the rules & examples before I begin.

In this case, I was ultimately able to make the correct interpretation of all the puzzle rules, but in a few instances there were some important subtleties that I didn't notice at first. For instance, in round four, it took me a minute to notice the given ship sizes on the far side of the sheet from puzzle 1. I also got very for down a wrong path because I presumed that pentomino types could not be repeated in puzzle 8.

The bonus system seems to be a good attempt to try and normalise the scores of otherwise incomparable scores to the rather arbitrarily chosen value of 60 minutes. It doesn't really make any account for going over 60 minutes so I suppose the puzzles should be so that the majority of solvers can actually finish them within the arbitrarily chosen time limit.

I would suggest a fairer thing to do would be to let this arbitrary time value vary for each puzzle (I guess something in the ratio of roughly 1:2:1:3 for this set), except this seems unnecessarily complicated, and you'd still have to pick an arbitrary time value. I suppose having a set of target times to try and beat is quite fun, but fairly working out what these target times should be a priori would appear to be a challenge to get right (although I'd hope that testing for this set would at least have suggested that 60 minutes for round 4 was going to cause problems...)

And if you can't have the target time a priori, I'm not sure why you would choose to normalise scores based upon an arbitrary time when you could more simply normalise the rank-time curves. You could still give people an (arbitrary and effectively nominal) points score for completing the puzzles and then base bonuses on the normalised rank-time curve.

As a separate issue, I would also argue that any sort of normalisation that uses #1 as a pivot point introduces unnecessary volatility and inaccuracy - see http://wpc-2013.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/around-world-in-80-puzzles-s... for an analysis.

Finally, the penalty multiplier for going over 60 minutes seems completely unnecessary, and worse quite demoralising, given that you are already rewarding people for going under 60 minutes. There is already a penalty, relatively speaking! I'd highly recommend getting rid of this multiplier.

The puzzle set was quite entertaining!


Edited by detuned 2013-09-26 3:14 AM

also, round 4 would have been better served as 2 lots of 3x2 arrays. You already had linked puzzles over multiple pages for round 2!

I see now that pentominoes can not be repeated, so perhaps my confusion was in regard to not having to use all the types. Anyway, I was definitely confused, and now I'm meta-confused. I also just went back and tackled the combination puzzle for Round 2... it was very difficult for me but I'm happy to have finished the whole test, however slowly.

Actually on part 4 the penalty multiplier for submitting over 60 minutes works reasonably well, and arguably it could have been stricter. Given that almost no one completes this round in under 60 minutes, if there were no penalty multiplier everyone who's persistent enough would get the same score (120 points) (except for the happy few who finished under 60 minutes and got a bonus). Finishing the whole set in 61 minutes or in 5 hours would get you the same score. Instead, right now someone who finishes 8 of the 12 puzzles under 60 minutes does get ever slightly more points than someone who only finishes 4 of the 12 under 60 minutes, and in turn that person gets more than someone who didn't finish a single puzzle in 60 minutes.

Denis

Where I could claim for points?
In the Great Wall puzzle answer key says "enter the numbers from left to right". So did I for row "I" (I started from this corner) and got "wrong mark". Then I changed answer according to arrow direction and it was accepted.
Now the penalty mark is shown in the table. I don't know how it really affects on points, but think there is some lack of them.

In any case I like the construction of this puzzle, but it seems to be too easy.

Will check what is missing, and remove penalty if something is wrong at our end.
You can "Claim No penalty" from Submissions tab.

ETA : In your first answer, "I" is as "Left to right", but "J" is "bottom to top, in the direction of arrow". This is not listed as a valid answer.
In your second try, you entered both I&J as per the direction of the arrow. We allow that.

If you enter both I&J, as per the IB you get points. If you enter both as per direction of arrow, you still get points. If you swap I and J, you also get points.
Other combinations are not allowed.

Edited by debmohanty 2013-09-26 11:22 AM

Thanks a lot for clarification. I've got this.

What was your most favorite round?	Round 3 - Great Wall
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

For the moment, I greatly prefer the TVC scoring system to the one here :) Failing to mark off one clue left a much much harder puzzle than I wanted to finish.

Thanks for the puzzles.

Edited by motris 2013-09-27 3:59 AM

At the moment, Para is 780.8 and I am 780.6. Seems like we're going for a wild race now. *opens betting*

But seriously. Either not all the masters have participated yet, or I somehow shot much higher now, with me still fighting for Top 5.

@motris: I can't see why leaving a clue unmarked makes the puzzle difficult?

Edited by chaotic_iak 2013-09-27 7:55 AM

@chaotic_iak: I mean I didn't put its logic into the puzzle by not crossing out one segment (row 3 middle) and then never went back to seeing it as useful. Effectively I was blind to some info, like I was solving a puzzle with fewer clues but it was totally my fault.

Edited by motris 2013-09-27 8:10 AM

I like the format of the test most. Usually once the test time is over I used to forget about it. Here the extended time made me to solve more puzzles. I hope this kind of a format will make more people try to solve the puzzles. Any how a great experience.

hey can some one tell me in price tag
do numbers carry forward
i mean what if units places add up to like 3+5+5 = 13 where should 1 go into tens place or neglect it ?

Are you asking should 3+5+5 be 13 or 3?

yes got it now :)

Edited by swaroop2011 2013-09-27 10:33 AM

What was your most favorite round?	Round 2 - Pentominos Samurai
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Too few pages / too small grids

The only one remark for the contest - some grids are too small.
But in any case I really enjoyed it.

What was your most favorite round?	Round 4 - Black & White Matrix
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Very skewed
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Perfect answer keys
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

What was your most favorite round?	Round 4 - Black & White Matrix
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

(1) Penalties: After looking at the results, it is clear that the penalty for wrong submisions should have been more severe (and should have point penalty also). When 3 of the top 4 (as of now) have penalties, it means something is wrong.

(2) Bonus structure: My personal experience is that R1 and R3 were easier as compared to the other rounds. So, those who did well in R2 and R4 should have got more bonus. But the reality was different. If I look at the 10th place bonus, it is 105 and 103 for R1 and R3 respectively, while it is 79 and 48 for R2 and R4. Have we got it right?

(3) Puzzles: Very good mix of puzzles, specially the R4 puzzles.

What was your most favorite round?	Round 3 - Great Wall
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Perfect answer keys
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Too few pages / too small grids

I was annoyed that the instructions weren't printed on the puzzle pages. It meant a lot of flipping around for me to check on rules, especially because of the types (like Lakes) that were similar to puzzles I'm used to solving.

It would have been nice to know that some rounds were much longer than others -- at least, it seemed that way to me, and my ranking didn't vary that much.

I loved the Great Wall theme and the execution was quite nice there too. The linked black/white puzzles was also a neat idea, but I had a hard time finding a reasonable solving path (probably because I'm too unfamiliar with some of these types). I did a bunch of solving by intuition more than by logic -- the instant grading was a huge help to get that confirmation that my solutions were the right ones!

The solving paths on the price tags and pentominoes were quite nice. Overall I had tons of fun. Thanks to the authors and to LMI for hosting!

Also I'm still seeing tons of "restricted post" here even though I am logged in and have finished all four rounds. Weird.

WPMM is over. MellowMelon, xevs and motris take the top 3 positions.
In individual rounds, murat has the best time in Price Tag, while motris has best time in all other rounds.

149 players completed Price Tag in 60 minutes. The corresponding numbers are 46, 115, 21 for Pentomino Samurai, Great Wall and B&W Matrix. As noted by most, the four rounds were not equally matched, with Matrix and Pentomino being much harder than the other two. So the borrowed bonus mechanism from Marathon didn't work best here. I will have to admit that I didn't focus enough on the bonus mechanism, mainly trying to have this contest for practice for WPC. It is really difficult to normalize the rounds when they are not close to each other, in terms of difficulty.

Its been a pleasure to host WPMM and I'm sure everyone is thankful to the puzzle authors for putting in the effort to provide a practice test before the WPC.

Thank you everyone for participating.

What was your most favorite round?	Round 4 - Black & White Matrix
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right