How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
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
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
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
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Clearly I should have done the practice first.

Edited by achan1058 2013-12-01 4:48 AM

A nice test !! Awesome puzzles !
Especially Minimal Blocks and Four Winds with Blanks.
Have to solve other puzzles though.
Just 30 seconds more and i was entering the answer key for Four Winds with Blanks :(
Anyways still enjoyed. Thanks to Authors and LMI. :)

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
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
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
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
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	A bit too many puzzles
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I couldn't find elegant way to solve Yin-Yang top. (ToT)
My favorites were Number connection bottom and Four winds with blanks bottom.

Edited by xevs 2013-12-01 7:51 PM

Hello Ko (and others),
Please see my diagram.
I have put all the 'easy' logic in first.
Then I see the two red rectangles have the form:
B.B
B.W
which must become:
B.B
BWW
Later, I use the same rule in the green rectangles.
I think that is enough to finish.

Thank you KiwiJam!

That's what I need.
Now, I wonder why I couldn't notice that. (ToT)

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
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
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	A bit too many puzzles
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I actually think that there were exactly right amount of puzzles, because of the amount of top solvers who were able to complete this competition within the time limit. There were just too many puzzles for me, but I think it's not bad (I would paint it green if I could). Anyway the puzzles were very interesting to solve, thanks to the authors!

TiiT

Birthday Blues?

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
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
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

A delightful test!The moment i saw the puzzle types in the IB I knew that this puzzle test had something in it for me and was going to be one very interesting test.Certaintly the test far exceeded my expectations.My favourites out of the puzzles i have solved until now are Four winds 2 which had a very high fun level and utilised the following concept : 'a particular cell where no number can reach' exceptionally well
,Sky-scrapers 2 which had a very beautiful logic quite similar to the one i encountered in a recent daily league sudoku,Divided sum cross 2

My only disppointment is that i was unable to complete the Divided sum cross 2 despite starting it with close to 30 minutes on the clock.The puzzle was proceeding very smoothly for about 20 minutes until the point where for some mysterious reason ,my brain mis-interpreted the upward sum 13 clue to be a rightward clue which forced me to enter a 1 in addition to the 7 and 5 already present .The puzzle
never broke until i was about to write the numbers in the last 2 cells!!!Unfortunately i had no time to notice where i had made the error let alone fix it.But this did not come even close to disrupting the good fun i had in solving the test.

Thanks to all the Japanese authors for creating meticulously such beautiful hand-made puzzles.This test indeed deserves the tag of being one of the best LMI puzzle tests.Lastly ,is that some Yin Yang theorem going on above in the forum?!Why can't it be a BWB???

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
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
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I liked Number Connection and the bottom Bar Graph was very beautiful.
Thanks to all authors for a nice test.

kishy, I had the same difficulty seeing that logic. I think the rule is "a region cannot touch itself only diagonally" because if it does that, then it must connect to itself somewhere else, but in doing so would have to split the other color's region into two groups. It's similar to the Cave/Corral rule of "the cave cannot touch itself diagonally" being very closely related to "all the non-cave walls have to connect to the outside".

So when you have
BB
..
BW
you cannot turn that into
BB
WB
BW
or else the W's connecting will isolate the diagonal B's, and vice-versa if you connect the diagonal B's.

So it must be
BB
.W
BW

If I'm wrong about the logic here, I hope someone will correct me quickly! I am just starting to learn how to do these puzzles (thanks to kiwijam for the tip here!)

You are right, joshuazucker. Regarding basic (and very important) strategies of Yin-Yang, this post in UKPA Forum (also by kiwijam!) will be helpful:
http://forum.ukpuzzles.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=619#p6259

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
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
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	A bit too many puzzles
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

JPL2 is now over.

The authors have been very kind to provide yet another set of "Extra" puzzles. These extra puzzles, solutions to the test puzzles and history of the puzzles types can be found here.

awesome thanks for extra practice puzzles :)

Many many thanks to the authors for the extra puzzles! :) I am new to solving puzzles and I did not fare well in this test. These extra puzzles will be of a great help to me so that I can improve.

This was an amazing test. It had a lot of types that I'm not strong at (not newer ones, interestingly enough) so I decided to do whatever I'm weak at first just as some experimentation. I got in both puzzles of all my weaknesses except the harder Number Connection, which I guess I'm still pretty bad at. By the time I reached the end, I only had stuff I'm good at but decided to do just the easy ones quickly with time running out. Was about a minute away from submitting that 100 pointer, but whatever. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

Also, I totally predicted that shape while discussing Minimal Blocks with Swaroop before the contest. The 2x2 region with no letters seemed like just the kind of cool little thing that these quality authors might force in

Thanks to the authors for putting this together, and also all the beautiful practice puzzles. I'm sure these extra puzzles will be fun too.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
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
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I often hear that being referred to as the Battenberg rule. I worked out why that was a bad pattern once, but basically use it as a memorised bad pattern to avoid now...

Thank you everyone for participating.

253 players participated, out of which 195 got non-zero scores. Congratulations to Ulrich Voigt (24/24, 106:27), Ken Endo (24/24, 113:17), Ko Okamoto (23/24, 118:41) for topping this test. Yuta Nagata (23/24, 117:14) and Palmer Mebane (22/24) were really close.

Here are some statistics:
- Most solved puzzle: Easy as ABC (Top) was solved by 157 players.
- Least solved puzzle: Four Winds with Blanks (Bottom) was solved by 19 players.
- Puzzle with highest rating: Four Winds with Blanks (Bottom) got 9.31 points.
- Puzzle with lowest rating: Skyscrapers (Top) got 6.88 points.

One additional note: We had 29 players from Japan this time (including some new players), and all of them got non-zero scores without giving up the test. I'm really happy to see that. I hope this test is the nice chance for new players to get interested in wide variety of logical puzzles and competitive solving.

Hideaki