Dear Puzzle Fans,

on the next weekend, the Logic Masters 2014 take place in Stuttgart. 41 german participants are fighting for the title of the German Puzzle Champion as well as for the qualification for the upcoming World Puzzle Championship in London.

This year we want to invite everybody to take part in parallel online contests. They will take place on the contest engine of Logic Masters Germany at

http://www.logic-masters.de/Wettbewerbe/?chlang=en

(You can't see the actual contest pages yet, they will be installed in the next days.) Each of the nine rounds in Stuttgart is a separate contest, the combined round time is around 7 hours. We now have finished an english instruction booklet for all nine contests. You can find it at

http://www.logic-masters.de/LM/2014.php

Each contest starts some minutes after the round in Stuttgart and lasts until 8pm monday evening (CEST/UTC+2). You can choose your starting time for each round/contest freely in this time window. A detailed schedule is also included in the instruction booklet.

If you have any questions, please ask them in this thread or in the online contest subforum of LM Germany

http://forum.logic-masters.de/forumdisplay.php?fid=27

This thread will be kept up to date in the next days and your questions will be answered. I will also be the judge for the online contests, if you have problems during the contest, you can contact me via personal message in the LM Germany forum (User Realshaggy) or via email at logicmasters2014@gmx.de .

We hope to see a lot of you take part in some of the contests next weekend and hope you have fun with our puzzles. We also like to provide a compiled ranking for those who are taking part in all contests.

Greetings from the german puzzle community.

Christoph Seeliger

Hi,

we've now prepared the contest pages, and there are only some hours left until the start of the first contest. For easy access please use our starting page

http://www.logic-masters.de/?chlang=en

Please remind, that you have time until monday evening 8pm (CEST/UTC+2) for each contest, so there is plenty of time, and you don't have to do them all in a row tomorrow (like the people in Stuttgart). Unfortunately you can not see any results until the end of the contests.

Some last minute remarks/changes:

The example for puzzle 7.15 (Word puzzle) was not unique, even after the first correction. We're sorry for that.

The participants in Stuttgart get the puzzles for Round 5 in cut out form. Unfortunately you have to cut them out on your own, there are two puzzles per printed page. For this disadvantage we extended the time limit for this round by 5 minutes for the online contests only. You now have 50 minutes for this round.
For the first solution code of this puzzle, you no longer get a penality of -5 points for every wrong placement.

Round 2 asks for a big number of solution codes compared to the round length, and you have to be careful while entering, because every field counts. Because of this, we extended the time limit for this round by 5 minutes for the online contest only. You now have 50 minutes for this round.

You can only get a time bonus for a round, if all your solution codes are correct, so please be careful.

The offline finals (Round 9) are held in a "horse-race-format" with a fixed order of the puzzles between the top 4 contestants of the preliminary rounds. We expect all of them to finish this round within the 60 minutes time limit, but don't want to reveal anything about the difficulty of the puzzles. So we give a flat amount of 50 points per puzzle for the online contest. For international top solvers, this round should be more about "who finishs first" than about the point values. Please just do the puzzles you like and don't be too angry if the point values are a little bit off.

We really hope you have some fun with our puzzles, whether you try to solve them within the time limit, or just download them for solving later. See you tomorrow.

Christoph Seeliger

Edited by Realshaggy 2014-06-21 6:21 AM

Correction:
While finishing the instruction booklet, I forgot that puzzle 7.4 Coral is 11x10. So there are no "main diagonals". Please use the diagonals starting from top left and from top right, even if they did not end in the opposite corner.

Whoops, looks like I missed the deadline for starting the online contest. Will the puzzles be posted without passwords?

Logic Masters 2014 is now over.

The offline finals were won by Ulrich Voigt, who defended his title and won his eight german championship. Second place goes to Florian Kirch, who won the preliminary rounds by a big margin of almost 200 points. Third place goes to Roland Voigt and fourth place to Martin Merker. This is also the GER-A-Team for the upcoming WPC (if they decide to take part, of course). Fifth place goes to Robert Vollmert who missed the finals by only one point.

For the online contests, I now have manually adjusted the points for Round 2 (Double Slitherlink) and also looked over all other scores. Special congratulations to James for finishing the Double Slitherlink and the Tinker Puzzle and to Hideaki Jo for finishing the Tinker Puzzle and the Hitori-Round. And a big thank you to all participants.

If you think you should get points for a puzzle which is now marked wrong, please send me a message until thursday.

After that, the tables will be finalized, and the contests can be started free again. Like every year, all puzzle files will also published without password protection, when the championship page is updated. (I don't know who will do it, and when.)

Hello,

I've now reviewed the point claims and finalized the rankings. All contests can now be started freely. That means you can solve them just like the original contest and see your results afterwards. However, your solutions and scores will not be stored permanently, but will be automatically deleted after 24 hours.

This is one way to download the puzzles and get the password for the encrypted files. But we have also added all non-encrypted puzzle files, solutions, scores, pictures and so on to the championship page:

http://www.logic-masters.de/LM/2014.php

There is also a bonus puzzle ("Stechen") which would have been used in case of a tie after the preliminary rounds. It's a "Tapa Restauration" where exactly one clue number is missing in every clue cell.

Here is a combined ranking of rounds 1-8, the preliminary rounds. Please keep in mind, that not all competitors took part in all rounds. The list contains everybody who submitted at least one puzzle in one round. Minimum round score is set to 0.


deu 1839
kiwijam 1548
NikolaZ 1416
PS2391 1334
nyuta 1294
Gotroch 1173
rimodech 1171
GiantPanda 691
jimrity 527
Ute2 526
Klärchen 491
zuzanina 346
ancyna 300
Krokofanz 300
Anke76 296
yureklis 295
dodi 293
angsay 275
pirx 225
M00se88 218
drsteve 195
rubbeng 189
RALehrer 165
swaroop2011 135
righthand 115
sf2l 110
term 105
ch1983 55
metsy 50
yoshimasa 45
r45 45
ukonet 30
noxxa 15
garganega 10
PRW 10
HWHW 5
j0an0 5
kaberg 5
devarajand 5
MrLiang 0


Online- and offline-results are hardly comparable for various reasons, however, here are the results of the Top 10 german offline competitors:

Florian Kirch 2087
Ulrich Voigt 1916
Matrin Merker 1830
Roland Voigt 1739
Robert Volmert 1738
Philipp Weiß 1658
Sebastian Matschke 1612
Michael Ley 1593
Hartmut Seeber 1292
Michael Smit 1275

Thanks again to all competitors, we hope you had some fun with our puzzles. See you next year, or maybe in London.

Last thing I want to do is some promotion.

First, Robert Vollmert is sharing some preparation puzzles he made in his puzzle blog. THhere is also a big (and hard) Double Slitherlink made by him in our puzzle portal

http://maybepuzzles.wordpress.com/
http://www.logic-masters.de/Raetselportal/Raetsel/zeigen.php?chlang...

Second, this weekend and until July 6th we have the "Berlin Stammtisch contest" on our website, which was created by some puzzlers from Berlin. It's kind of a marathon contest, but you have 24hours to solve it after you started the timer.

http://www.logic-masters.de/Wettbewerbe/wettbewerb.php?id=64

Thanks for placing these puzzles online. It was really fun to solve. My favorite round was definitely the 5th round, but all of them were pretty good.