Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Scrabble with Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Battleships
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Coded Snake
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Nice puzzles. I thought Nurikabe was easier. The most puzzle I like is Summon even if it was hard, the least - Snake, I hate snakes, even more like spiders than those ba******. :) Can someone post the solution for this? (it can be priv message) After 2 hours of tortures I've got this http://i.imgur.com/PCQgIXt.jpg and wanted to throw my computer out of the window. Yeah, I know about the mistakes at the bottom and on the top...

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Statue Park
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Meandering Numbers
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Bit unfair

The puzzles were all quite nice in the abstract, but the difficulties were poorly calibrated.

RC Snake was clearly a difficult puzzle, not a medium one, and Summon was just a monster (I broke it 3 times, but even after I understood my mistake it took me about 3 hours to work through it).

I would like to side with those who suggested that, in future years, the cut-off time for difficult puzzles should become longer than 60 minutes, or one should still be able to earn some bonus in some way for performing well. I am reasonably pleased with my time on Hidoku, and to a lesser extent on RC Snake, but rather disappointed that the scoring system doesn't make a difference between solving in 75 minutes and taking many hours. (Of course, if I had done really well, neither of those would have taken an hour and I perhaps wouldn't be complaining as much :)

Also, I know that's a very unfair/specific complaint but, as the author of a puzzle that was more carefully calibrated in terms of difficulty level, I feel very slightly annoyed that I only get to discard my performance on only one of the insanely hard puzzles rather than two of them like almost everyone else. That could create an incentive for authors to create hard marathon puzzles rather than easy ones :-) just kidding.

Denis

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Scrabble with Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Summon
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Upon reflection, I think both the original scoring system, and the revised one for 2015 (is it implemented?) are both pretty bad. If you look at it by rank, I got 32nd place on the summons, and 61st place and 86th place on the Meandering Numbers and Regional Battleships. Yet, the former is being marked as my worst one, and got bonuses on the latter two.

I think we should just use the top ranks to determine the bonuses as suggested by debmohanty. If there is a need for players to know when to give up, set a long cut-off time for no bonus, after say 3 hours, presumably after the top competitors would have solved the problem.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Fillomino
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Battleships
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Bit unfair

The restriction on starting just one puzzle at a time seriously detracts from the enjoyability of the contest. Participants should be in charge of their choices and times. Anyone who wants to play for bonus time is free do so. A starting restriction forcing everyone to play that strategy is unwelcome.

The 2015 system was implemented ( http://logicmastersindia.com/2015/03P/score2015.asp ), it has definite problems as pointed out by Stefano.

The key at this point is to realize that that there are thirteen different letters that must cover the numbers 1 through 13. Once you realize which letters have to represent "1" and "2" the rest of the puzzle follows pretty smoothly.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Meandering Numbers
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Battleships
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Summon
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Bit unfair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Battleships
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Summon
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Meandering Numbers
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Puzzle Marathon 2015 is over now. Overall 393 participants participated and 290 scored points. 84 participants from USA and 52 from India. 93 participants completed all ten puzzles.

Congratulations to Endo Ken (EKBM), Hideaki Jo (deu), Bram de Laat (Para), Robert Vollmert (rob) and William Blatt (willwc) for finishing as the Top 5.

Special mention for deu as the only participant to score bonus in all ten puzzles.

Congratulations to Prasanna (19th), Swaroop, Amit, Ashish, Kishore and Jayant for finishing as the top participants from India.

to our ten authors - Ashish Kumar, Denis Auroux, Fred Couglin, James McGowan, Ko Okamoto, Matej Uher, Prasanna Seshadri, Riad Khanmagomedov, Robert Vollmert and Swaroop Guggilam - for providing the puzzles for this contest.

We shall be responding to most of the comments soon, but let us do a summary of the puzzle difficulty first.

We observed that the differentiation between easy, medium and hard puzzles was not too significant, in the last few marathons. This time we planned to have a clearer categorization:
- 3 easy puzzles where top solvers should finish in ~15 minutes
- 4 medium puzzles where top solvers should take ~25 minutes
- 3 hard puzzles where top solvers should take ~35 minutes.

Statue Park and Fillomino were indeed easy and, not surprisingly, both had the maximum bonus submissions. Statue Park is easier than Fillomino but Fillomino is more familiar.

Nurikabe is a medium category puzzle difficulty wise but due to its familiarity it has been kept as the third easy puzzle. Going by the best times, it still fits into the Easy category as the times are lesser than other puzzles. But there were mixed opinions on this and even some top puzzlers stumbled on this puzzle.

Regional Battleships and Meandering Numbers clearly fit the Medium category with the expected level of difficulty.

Turning Fences was a tough puzzle, but it was also present in a previous marathon, so was a familiar puzzle. It proved to be harder than expected. Post event, we can say it was a hard puzzle rather than medium.

Regional Coded Snake proved to be hard too, going by the solving times. It was classified as the 7th toughest but, post event, it proved to be the 8th toughest and should have been placed after Scrabble Loop on the difficulty index.

Hidoku, Scrabble Loop and Summon were intended to be tougher than most of the marathon puzzles so far (all editions included). While Hidoku and Scrabble Loop were as per the planned level of difficulty, Summon, with just three numbers to fill, proved to be too tough. Although there were lot of obvious starting points (six digit numbers, 1000, etc), completing the puzzle in 60 minutes proved to be difficult as there were too many mini steps to solve. Based on the timings, it fits a category 'SuperHard'.

It was the toughest marathon yet. As bob said "Most puzzles are snacks, these are banquets." Hopefully most puzzlers would have enjoyed the banquet setting.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Battleships
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Coded Snake
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Statue Park
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Could not solvce even a single puzzle

Bug: Someone that didn't solve all puzzles (me, my Summon broke again) sees incomplete standings.

Fixed.

Snake solution has been sent via email.

Look at the first two rows. The six digit number in the first row and the five digit number in the second row limit a lot of possibilities. You should be able to complete the regions in the top left corner (with a lot of Xs). Then there is a row with the sum as 1000. Think how can you reach 1000 as the sum. And, keep looking at the sums below for vertical constraints.

I liked all the puzzles, even the types I usually don't like (Snake, Nurikabe, Battleships) as they all make good use of the room. I also don't have problems with a contest with a high overall difficult level and very difficult puzzles like the Summon, even if that means it's not suited for beginners. But the scoring system should be revised. By now there should be enough test data from three years. Of course it's difficult with different solving times. If it should feel like a marathon for the top solvers, it's near impossible for me.

No offense to the author, but I think especially Nurikabe is a bad type for a timed contest on a marathon grid. Seems like it's even more favourable to use intuition than a logical approach.

I would love to get starting instructions, on how to solve each type of puzzles.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Statue Park
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Turning Fences
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Fillomino
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Average
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Meandering Numbers
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Battleships
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Nurikabe
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Battleships
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Scrabble with Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Fillomino
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Summon
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Battleships
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Every puzzle in this contest was awesome. Thanks to all the authors!

I also have to mention that the box in the middle of the hidoku was extremely cute as well as the 360-400 path.

Regarding the scoring system, I like the suggestion of increasing the time limit to, say, 2 hours for the hard puzzles (assuming that future puzzle marathons will have similar difficulty to this one). I also like the idea of just giving bonuses for your best ranks as suggested by Aaron, probably the only problem with that is the feeling of "I don't know if it's safe to stop working now and take a break". Maybe the 50 points for 1st, 49 points for 2nd, etc. but you only get the bonus in the first place if you solve it in 2 hours/whatever time limit.

Edited by anderson 2015-03-17 6:34 PM