I will say this much - the given instructions are enough to understand the exploratory part. If it were necessary to add new ones, we would have. But Exploratory can also be a different mode of presentation of the puzzle. Experienced players may not find these surprising, but we thought it would be a nice additive for beginners, to get used to the twists and surprises that accompany puzzle solving, without stepping out of the normal form too much.

Also, many thanks to Vladimir Portugalov for test solving the set. Deb provided some useful feedback too, as always.

Contest has started.

The link for the result page is wrong; it goes to the page of "LMI practice test".

The score page now available (without Category Bonus)
Link : http://logicmastersindia.com/BeginnersPuzzle/201311/score.asp

Wow. Very nice set of puzzles, but the first star battle variation was deliciously evil. I had to re-read the rule three times to figure it out. Otherwise, as expected I'm really not a slitherlink specialist...

-- Denis

An interesting initiative. and one with a few tweaks is what I'd like to see form the basis of the WPF's puzzle GP. I look forward to giving this a go.

However one thing that really bothers me is the fact you are lumping two separate types into one contest. I can appreciate you want to introduce as many new types as possible, but I'm not sure the final scores can have any real meaning. Why not have two contests running simultaneously, but independently, and have two sets of winners? That way you would have a clear slitherlink winner, and a clear star battle winner, which seems far more meaningful to me.

This is a good point. We will separate the score pages, but we are yet to work on that. The priority was to get the contest up and running this week.

I enjoyed the puzzles very much, but to be honest, the Star Battle part had a little bit too much "gimmicks" for a beginner contest.

Is there anything that I am missing in the two puzzles in the Exploratory part. Any special rules etc.

I've started slitherlink, my timer started and I can see the space to submit the answers. But I am not able to see the problems. Where can I find the puzzles??

edited
Sorry...I got it :)

Edited by abhilash1912 2013-11-02 3:15 AM

Good that you found it out.

Players who are participating for the first time need to note that the puzzles are available in a password protected pdf file, which they must download before starting the round (see green arrows in the image below).
The password for the pdf will be displayed once you start the round, and you can open the pdf file. (see red arrows in the image below)





@rvarun
No special rules. But you anyway have figured them out by now.

Thanks PS for the test.That was great fun!Wish more of this sort tests come more often.I got stuck for a long time in the 3rd (Intermediate)puzzle which i felt had as much sting in it as the more challenging ones.In the end it boiled down to one crucial deduction that had eluded me for a long time in the 3rd Intermediate.

I have one minor suggestion that i would like to give for this test.Wouldn't it better if the test is spread out on more papers than just 2?Of course it looks nice and compact now with just 2 A4s for star Battle.I haven't solved slitherlink yet.But i don't mind spending a couple more papers for such a nice test.For example the spread could have been like this:2 exploratory on a new page vertically aligned(so Total 3 )or 2 intermediate on a seperate page and 2 exploratory on a seperate page(Total 4).Though that would put just 2 introductory on one page it looks oK to me.
(I spend a lot of papers for less useful reasons anyway!)So at the max just 2 more papers but the experience would be even more better I feel.

My favourites in this Star Battle test were the 6th and the 8th puzzle with the latter occupying the top spot.I have solved just 1 or 2 of these 'irregular' type star battle puzzles in the past and this one served as a good practice .Overall a great set of puzzles for beginners like me!!!

Star Battle : very pleasant ! I lost too much time on the 3rd pb to have a good score, and I was quite destabilised by the 7th. After the 40 minutes have passed, everything appears clear !
Concerning scores, I suppose we have to wait to have the real scores : I'm pointed with 44 points ?!? I finished just the 1-2-3-4 within 40 minutes, and all the others later.
So I could understand 16 pts (3+3+5+5) or 29 (3+3+bonus 6 +5+5+ bonus 7) or 46 (3+3+bonus 6 +5+5+ bonus 7 + 9/2 + 9/2 + 8/2 + 8/2), but not 44...

Yeah, there's a few things to fix on the score page as it is now. They will be fixed. We're a bit short on time right now. Festival time in India

Nice set of puzzles.

The time could have been 90 minutes. 40 minutes seems less especially for beginners.

--TNV

Nice puzzles.

As a presentational issue, although the instruction booklet gives a consistent set of rules for the exploratory star battles, most solvers understand there to be the same number of stars per region as there is for rows/columns - especially when this is the case for the first 6 puzzles. As an experienced puzzle solver myself, I had to scratch my head for 30 seconds on #7 to make sure i was ok on the rules. From that respect, the "2 *" label was a little misleading, and perhaps something like "2 * row/column, 3* region" would have been fairer.

Nice set of puzzles. Finally completed the Slitherlink after an internediate break of more than two hours. It was tough to concentrate on long time. Hope I rectify this by more practice.

Hi,
Can anyone post the solution of 7th star battle puzzle after the test.I have a doubt about the puzzle.

Not able to understand why you haven't given the option to solve the puzzles online. Are we suppose to take printout of each PDF to solve it? writing it, erasing it, too much time wasted on trivial work than puzzle solving. This is disappointing.

I don't see why its disappointing when its about 1 minute to print and the rest is solving, which should be the same experience whether its on paper or online. Whats the difference between clicking/undoing and writing/erasing?

Considering writing and erasing a waste of time is just not the right outlook to have. The World Puzzle Championships happen on paper, and it is always preferred to have offline competitions (whenever possible national championships in different countries are offline too).

Also, I'm sorry, but I have to say, why is a free contest disappointing simply because you don't get some really difficult-to-design technology?

I found the star battle pretty challenging -- there was, at least the way I solved them, some tricky counting to figure out certain star locations, along with the usual use of number of stars per region and so on. I feel like I've gotten better at them with some recent practice, but still felt pretty rusty.

The slitherlinks I enjoyed more and thought they were beautiful puzzles. I did a bit of intuitionistic work on a couple of them, though, so I'm interested to learn more about how the purely logical solves should go, especially on the countdown spiral.

Throughout the contest, I liked the clear themes behind each puzzle's design. The slitherlink seemed especially good that way, where you had to use different solving techniques on the different puzzles, and I saw some of that on the star battle too (where some emphasized in/out, others the fact that no stars could touch, for instance).

The exploratory star battles were fine variations but I felt like again the slitherlink examples showed some really different solving logic to use to deal with the new style of given information. The two of them had really different solves, too.

I think this is a great beginner test, too, where at least the first few puzzles are really accessible to quite beginnerish solvers, even if the last ones get somewhat tough.

Thanks for the fun puzzles!

Solution is 161627372.

This was a tricky one. Got fooled by the symmetry and made mistakes a few times.

HTH

-TNV

Beginners contest for November is over.

Thanks to the different solvers for all the feedback thats been given. I will generally explain some of the thought process that went into things and hope to cover all relevant points. Mainly, I'll say that most of the things we wanted happened here. Its probably debatable if what we wanted is actually whats best :)

Firstly, we feel that there should be a good challenge even for the Beginners. I mean, we could throw in 8 easy puzzles and keep it at 90 minutes so that about 50 beginners will finish, but we don't see that as a good challenge, especially when there is extended time to solve and get some points for the rest. My expected target was that about 10% of the Beginners should finish each set. By that marker the Star Battle has probably turned more difficult than imagined, or "gimmicky".

More than finish-ability though, the priority for us was to establish a system that allowed two things we feel are highest priority for beginners -
1. Accessible, easy puzzles that everyone can solve and get to understanding the type.
2. Challenging, and even twisted ones that are more towards elevating the beginner through the final step into mastering said type.

The major contests often have twists, variations, and even one single round could have a variety of different types. So compared to that, if we don't keep the twists here somewhere, there's too much of a gap between the major contests and these helpful contests. The point of having a contest that concentrates on just one or two types should be to cover most of the things that can be done with said types.

For Star Battle, maybe the rules could've been worded to "stand out" a bit more to prepare folks for the 7th puzzle, but when we introduce an Exploratory category with the main purpose being twists, and then we say the given rules will cover the exploratory part too, it is expected that the rules be read carefully for possible loopholes. Again, this is probably not good to expect complete newcomers to do, but we think its a necessary part of preparing a solver for major contests. However, if more participants feel the rules need to be clearer about the twist, we can consider that for future contests.

Regarding solutions and solving tips, we'll hopefully have them ready by next week.

Thank you all for participating, and now that the format is in place (and I think, been generally successful), we'd love it if other authors express interest in putting together future Beginners' Puzzle Contests.