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.

By the way, when will puzzle booklets with solution(held on November 2013) be uploaded?

Good question. I think we'll be able to upload it on Saturday, but if not then surely by Tuesday. Its a bit of a double-duty week for me with an offline event to conduct too

I will be providing a few starting steps for Star Battle Number 7 as that has been requested by a participant on the forum. If any other ones are required in more detail, feel free to let me know.

Solutions are now appended to the puzzle booklets. Links below, for quick reference :

Star Battle Booklet

Slitherlink Booklet

The hints for SB7 included on the last page.

Can we have the four shapes - L, I, T and S in the Instruction booklet as how the shapes will look so that any beginner can find out about the shapes and then go about the Sample problems in the Instruction booklet.

i am in chennai,
when is next competition ????

This is an online competition. You can participate wherever you are.

Attaching Image containing LITS shapes. Remember it can be Rotated and Reflected.





Attachments
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LITS_sym.png (5KB - 2 downloads)

Well its 1st test this year and 1st test for me too as an author.
I wish Best of luck to all ! Hope you will enjoy the test. :)

I liked the test. Not surprisingly (for me), I did much better on the LITS compared to the skyscraper. Any tips on how to improve on the latter? I often have to write out the min/max range on a cell, which may not be the best idea.

Skyscrapers kills me again. I don't know what it is about that puzzle type that just screws with my brain, but it just won't solve those puzzles. At least there was the warm comfort of LITS to make me feel better. :)

I almost complained about LITS 7 having no solution (thinking that R6C8 must be part of T, which collides with R5C8; I submitted the answer key with that solution), before I noticed that it might be L. Luckily that part wasn't in the answer key, so it's still correct. :P Nice puzzles!

achan1058: For me (that is not a strong solver for Skyscrapers either), you can try to keep track where the highest numbers are (the numbers N, then N-1, then N-2, ...), and also to put some inequality signs on the grid... At least for this particular test those two are enough.

Really elegant puzzles :) I liked that the variations were very friendly, but made the solving process rather different.

Any idea what are the plans for the coming Beginners' Puzzles?

The strategy I use for Skyscrapers, beyond the obvious "Where are the Ns? Where are the N-1s? ...", is to replace clues with inequalities as much as possible and cross out clues that are redundant. So for example, in Skyscraper 6 on the test, when you get the 6 on R3C2, you can write R3C6 < R3C5 < R3C4 < R3C3 and then cross out the 5 clue. You can also sometimes cross out clues after writing in candidates for some cells. Here's an example in a partial 1-4 puzzle:

____
4___ 3
____
____

Here, if you mark that R2C4 can only have 1 or 2, and that R2C3 can only have 1 or 3, then all remaining ways to resolve that row satisfy the 3 clue and you can cross it out. (This is one of the more nontrivial uses that comes up a lot, so I just know it now.)

In general, I find that I have only one or two clues that aren't crossed out when I hit any sticking points in the middle, so then I know which clues to take a harder look at.

The biggest weakness of this approach is that it doesn't deal well with clues that give information like "the first cell is the largest of all before the 6". So it won't help as much on puzzles like this one: http://www.gmpuzzles.com/blog/2013/02/dr-sudoku-prescribes-33-skysc... Also, if you're bad at Futoshiki (aka greater-than latin squares), writing in the inequalities might not be as helpful for you.

And as I didn't win the Skyscrapers portion of the contest, bear in mind that this may not be the best advice anyway.