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 :)