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

I had a lot of trouble with puzzle 4. Having to compete at 3am is already a problem but I think its also because of the IB/PB.
I solved the top right puzzle and end up with the same contradiction over and over, only to find out that I have been solving it as a Corral and not
Paint it Black.
And when I do solve the Corral, I convinced myself that it had multiple solutions.
I had to redownload the IB to see "black cells cannot surround white cells" -- is this rule usually in Corral?

Also half way through Pata, I saw the "1" clue and was like "whattt???"
I could be wrong, but isn't Pata where the clue works for both black cells and white cells?
Again, had to refer back to the IB and completely re-erase the whole puzzle.

To make matters worse, I also couldn't prove to myself how the Pentomino Blokus isn't broken.
Then I saw "some pentominoes". Ugh.

Its all my fault, but when you use familiar names of puzzles - I'm sure there are others who just don't read the IB that carefully.
Once my hour was up I just went to bed.

I really enjoy Price Tag and the first Pentomino Samurai (the one with a lot of 4s). Just beautiful.

I usually make the distinction by saying Corral for the Nikoli loop type and Coral for the type used here which is also quite common. Some others use the distinction of Cave and Corral respectively. But for these rules, with the outside clues, it is always that black cells cannot surround white cells, as far as I know.

Pata : The one you're referring to is probably Tapa Clones (see TVC XIV IB to confirm), and Pata has always been as the rules are here.

I know some people might not usually read the IB carefully, but when you have 12 connected puzzles, its best to read everything I think :P

I believe this puzzle is called Coral; Corral is the one with numbers inside the grid. That's one thing about puzzle names. Not sure though. In Corral, I know that the original version has a loop, so it's impossible to have white area enclosed inside a black area as the result will not be a loop.


You mistaken Pata for Tapa Clones :3 Don't worry, I also mistaken Windows' black cells as simply Tapa wall and not Corral.


To tell the truth, I also had the same problem, although I kept the IB and quickly checked it when I saw it's impossible to have all pentominoes.

---

Next up. Congratulations for the winners. Also congratulations for Para that pushed me down again (or more precisely I blame others that made Para's position better :P ), since I had been watching the positions of me and Para over time and I once won for like two days or so. Congratulations for murat, which even though he(?) is 31st, but he scores rank 1 in Round 1; congratulations for motris that scores rank 1 in everything else; congratulations for MellowMelon for topping the test as usual even though there's a slip up in Round 3 (you know MellowMelon has a slip up when an average (okay above than average but still not a master) solver like me beats his score :/ ) and without holding any rank 1's (even though he has three rank 2 :P ).

Edited by chaotic_iak 2013-09-30 7:49 PM

What was your most favorite round?	Round 4 - Black & White Matrix
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?	Very 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

@chaotic: With that rank and that company, it wasn't an average performance. You should be proud of yourself.

Regarding the bonus structure, it is true it had room to improve. Though, there is the somewhat appropriate distinction of having captured the feel of WPC playoffs (it puts the WP in WPMM!), where a top solver's hangup on one puzzle let someone else get ahead, and I did manage to get the lowest total time somehow. That said, I'm not sure how many other metrics besides the used bonus structure and total time would have put me ahead of motris's impressive triple 1s. I seem to be 2 for 2 on getting lucky with Marathon scoring systems this year...

Since it seems like no one put it down as their favorite, I did think the initial steps of the price tag puzzles were really nice; they just got a bit too arithmetic heavy when you needed to finish them out and ran out of row/column clues to use.

I'll add my thanks to the authors, the puzzles themselves were great!
As Zoltan mentioned earlier these were spare puzzles that could have just been published in a blog, but by making them into a little contest we all enjoyed them more (ignoring the scoring system).

Yes, this was a lot of fun! I really enjoyed both the puzzles (very well designed) and the general format of the contest. (Though ideally the rounds would have nominal durations more commensurate to the time it takes to complete them). I hope we can see more such mini-marathons in the future.

Denis

Hello everybody!

The competition finished some days ago, but I didn' have too much time nowadays.

First of all, thank you for the LMI that we could organize this event. Especially for Deb who supported the idea from the first moment. And he had lots of work with the competition sides, scoring page etc.

Next, there were 3 puzzlemakers of the WPMM, but the rest group also provide valueable support.

Zoltán Németh 's written the rules of the puzzles.
Zoltán Gyimesi checked the puzzles, and György István was my contact with the host of WSC/WPC.
Thank you all of them.


Congratulations to the top finishers.
Mellowmelon, xevs and motris.

19 solver could solve all four round with maximum points.
But the bonus points have a big influence, so they aren't the first 19 finishers.

I think this can happen on the WPC, as wiell.
Then the difficulty of rounds are different on WPC. Some rounds are finishable, in others the best result can be only 70%.

For an online competition it is important that the different rounds have almost same difficulty. But this never happen on WPCs.
Otherwise, after the first Marathon there were a long debate about the optimal point system. So I thought it could work well in this case without any change.


Now that the IB has been published I would like to sharesome thoughts about these puzzles.

R1: I think this is a really nice puzzle type. We didn't want to make a full round of Price tag on the WPC , t will appear just in the Digital round and in the Final.
But I wanted to make a more simple round, because R2,R3 and R4 have really complicated rules.

R2: This was a practise puzzle for the Weakest link team round. I wanted to represent the working of these Samurai puzzles. I hope it was succesfull through an enjoyable puzzle :)

R3: This round has a Chinese theme. But the puzzle type won't be too important on WPC. Just like Price tag.

R4: Finally this puzzle were made as an example for Part8. So it was the most important round on this competition. I hope after this practise puzzle more player will achive a good result in this round. Thank you for Pál Madarassy for this great sample. (And he's the author of competition puzzle, too.) Accrding to the votes this was the favourite round.


Finally, thank you for everybody who interested in for the event. And good luck to everybody in China.

Best, Zoltán

Then a good news for you that in the finals you can solve this puzzle type without the arithmetic part :)