Thread - JPL2 — LMI November Puzzle Test

@ 2013-12-03 2:24 PM (#13679 - in reply to #13678) (#13679) Top

prasanna16391

Posts: 1801

Country : India

prasanna16391 posted @ 2013-12-03 2:24 PM

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.

@ 2013-12-03 8:20 PM (#13684 - in reply to #13561) (#13684) Top

detuned

Posts: 152

Country : United Kingdom

detuned posted @ 2013-12-03 8:20 PM

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

@ 2013-12-03 8:22 PM (#13685 - in reply to #13669) (#13685) Top

detuned

Posts: 152

Country : United Kingdom

detuned posted @ 2013-12-03 8:22 PM

joshuazucker - 2013-12-03 12:20 AM

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!)

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...

@ 2013-12-05 1:20 AM (#13699 - in reply to #13561) (#13699) Top

deu

Posts: 69

Country : Japan

deu posted @ 2013-12-05 1:20 AM

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