In E1 Star battle my logic went like this.

1. Every region need to have 6 stars.
2. At C2 there must be a stars.
3. The same region holds 2 stars at column A and D.
4. So one star must be at B or C9.
5. The other small region holds 2 stars at column F and H.
6. One star at G 5/6/7.
7. One at I 2/3.
But i wasted hell of time and could not finish the puzzle. Can any one guide me were I went wrong.

You haven't gone wrong anywhere so far, but you can reduce things more. Remember that there can be only one star for each 2x2 area of cells. Dividing the "K" shape into this distribution helps - 1 star in I23/H3. 1 star in H34. 1 star in F34. One star in F56/G56. One star in F78. One star in H78. (G7 cannot be a star because you need 2 stars in F78/G7/H78 and this will contradict things). You should be able to reduce it further from here.

I'm embarrassed, but I have no idea how the matching rule was supposed to work for A4. Can someone put me out of my misery?

G6 also cannot hold a star. If we place a star at G6, F8 and H8 must hold a star, this restricts placing any star between E9 and I9. Is this logic correct.

No, you can still fit 2 stars in the remaining 4 cells of the row, A/D9 and B/C9. You can reduce it elsewhere on the K.

Hint: What are the images made up of?

Congrats Amit, Rohan and Swaroop for the Podium finish. All the Best for the WPC. :-)

Hmmm, my first time ever having a time bonus :) I think someone mistakenly configured the scoring page so that solving 26 puzzles would give a time bonus, but solving more wouldn't :-) Apart from that, great puzzles!
Denis

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 of the booklet formatting and printing?	I have a different complaint

Very nice puzzles!

My only complaint is with Coded TomTom puzzle (C3). Symbol for division looks very similar to plus symbol. Maybe next time using / symbol for division might be better.

Edited by Gotroch 2014-05-26 1:17 PM

Did the Instructions Booklet (IB) provide enough information about participating in IPC?	Yes, mostly.
Did you understand the puzzle rules, examples and answer keys from the IB?	I understood most of them.
After your experience in IPC, are you going to participate in future championshiops or contests at LMI?	Most likely

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 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?	A bit hard
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
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 of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Wow, that was bad.
Puzzles I broke:
B2, D1, D3, E1 twice, H1, I2, J1 three times, J2, J3 twice, L1 (14 breaks, using logic? I must be dead)
Missed: B2, D3, H1, I2, K3, K2, L2

Fixed.

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 of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Hey everyone,

Solutions will be released soon after the last International participants finish the test.

On a related note, since I haven't yet explicitly stated details associating puzzles to authors, you all can go ahead and guess in replies here, if you want, for fun.

Hints: Me, James, Bram each contributed 3 of the 13 sections. Thomas/Grant contributed 3 together with Thomas writing the variants where applicable. Deb contributed 1 section.

The Indian Puzzle Championship is now officially over even for the International participants.

The Solutions booklet can be downloaded here . Congrats to uvo, EKBM and deu, the International Top 3. Ulrich was the only one to finish all 35 puzzles correctly, with 12 minutes to go.

I hope everyone enjoyed the puzzles. Congrats once again to the Official winners Amit, Rohan and Swaroop. I'll give you all a day to guess the authors and post my notes about puzzle selection, etc. tomorrow. In the meantime, please feel free to ask for hints on individual puzzles and also to give more feedback on the competition in general.

Thank you all for participating!

My guess for authors:
Thomas/Grant - C,D,F
Prasanna - I,G,E
Deb -A
Bram - B,L,K
James - J,M,H

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?	Fairly Nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I really liked the test, but I have one thing to consider.

"Match the following" is a guessing puzzle. My personal view is, that there should be no guessing puzzles in a logic puzzle test. Especially when one thinks about that A2 was too guessy even for the puzzle makers, so they gave the rules for it. Which means, "a little guessy" is ok, or what? Why do we give all the rules to all the other puzzles then anyway?

First, thanks for the thoughts. This is an interesting take on "Match the Following" because the purpose to include that is to interest participants who are new to logic puzzles and might want some familiar ground. I can see where you're coming from as these in general won't follow a "solve path" as some of the common logic puzzles, but they do not require guessing either. It can sometimes be an intuitive solve, as are many other logic puzzles.

A1 was simple equations, A2 is basically another iteration of Simple Math. The rules were given because the rules were given in the Instruction booklet too. When equations are there, "precedence" and "repeating" are common clarifications, and are such in Simple Math too which is a common logic puzzle. Out of curiosity, would you call TomTom a guessing puzzle? Because A2 is an easier version of that with digits given and without the Latin Square rule.

A4 and A5 were instructionless puzzles which are a common enough occurrence in Logic Puzzle competitions. The logic there is in thinking what the association could be. Its intuitive, but I wouldn't call it guesswork, because there's enough there to make something out of. Counting puzzles have been present in WPCs before, and Elastic Bands definitely didn't require guesswork, its a simple case of spotting the vertices.

Did the Instructions Booklet (IB) provide enough information about participating in IPC?	Yes, mostly.
Did you understand the puzzle rules, examples and answer keys from the IB?	I understood all of them.
Did you find enough easy puzzles to solve during the championship?	Yes, there were many of them.
After your experience in IPC, are you going to participate in future championshiops or contests at LMI?	Most likely

A,B,I - Prasanna
C,F,H - Thomas and Grant
G - Deb
E,L,J - James
D,K,M - Bram

Regards,
Ravi

I want to share the way I did A2. Let's see whether anyone else uses the same method...

I simply make a table for all possibilities. Like, A can only go to Y or Z (if I recall correctly), etc. Now, for each equation:

Note that operations may not be repeated in an equation. So I began by trying where the division goes, if any. This usually makes some other multiplication sign forced, and there are only two more possibilities.

After that, I tried putting the multiplication sign. As there's no more division, the multiplication occasionally blows up the result, so there aren't many ways for this to go either.

After tabulating, just do a Latin Square thingy to pick one from each equation and one from each result.

I took about 2-3 minutes here, so giving 20 points here is interesting...

---

Regarding Match the Following, the three puzzles with instructions aren't guessing at all; they are simply usual puzzles taking in a different form of matching. A4 and A5 are more inductive, as in there's no set rules and in some way you can interpret things differently, but they only worth 10 points and IPC in some way is different from usual monthly puzzle tests due to this: having inductive puzzles.