Been a while since I've been able to compete in one of the contests. Amazing how having a second little boy born into your family will do that! When I saw this one was starting, though, I had to set aside time to make it happen. Glad I did. Even though I think I only managed bonus on three of the puzzles, I at least completed nine of them. The only one I didn't was (predictably) Summon, which I decided to pass on after a couple of hours, and then reading the comments here. The puzzles were all very enjoyable across the board, and I thank all the creators for giving us such a lovely variety of large, tough puzzles.

Now, that being said, I wanted to offer a slight counter-balance to some of the comments. Personally, I don't know that I really want to see a scoring system where I feel like I need to keep struggling with a puzzle into a second or third hour. As mentioned, I now have two boys under my roof, so time is a precious commodity. I have to start these puzzles in the evening, after they've gone to bed, and it's purely luck as to whether I'll even get one hour of quiet to work on it. Two puzzles this time were interrupted by wake-ups (fortunately I don't think I was going to bonus either of them). I have a difficult time setting aside TEN one hour blocks during a week+. I simply don't see how I could plan for ten blocks of up to three hours each. That kind of time simply doesn't exist for me during a week. I'd personally rather see the difficulty taken down a notch on those hardest of hard puzzles. I don't expect to get bonus in everything, because I'm not a world-class solver, but I would like to feel like it's at least possible to make it fit in the time I can make for it.

Again thanks to all the creators, and I look forward to next year, whatever the format!

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

I like this idea very much.
1. Solving time bonus if the puzzle is submitted within the bonus period ( The bonus period was 60 for all puzzles in this contest, but as many have suggested it should be varying depending upon the puzzle difficulty)
2. Rank bonus for top 100 (This is independent of bonus period)

Assuming the bonus period is 60 minutes for Statue Park, Fillomino, Nurikabe, 75 minutes for Meand Numbers, Turning Fences, Reg Battleships, and 90 minutes for RC Snake, Scrabble, Hidoku, Summon, here is what the bonus points will look like for top 25. Link to excel file for further analysis.

Hi,

First of all, thanks to all the authors and organizers for the very nice contest.

Also very interesting the discussion about the score system. I have a proposal to be considered for the following Marathon (at the end, it is a kind of mixture bw. other proposals).

1. Not to limit the time for submission.
a. This will force not to give-up a puzzle after 60 mins and I think still fits very well with a marathon philosophy.
This implies,, of course, a change on the scoring system.
2. Ranking of the Puzzles (from hardest to easiest) would be defined after all submissions are done, considering top1, top 25 and/or top 50 (for example) submission times.
Once the rank is defined, the score for each Puzzle is defined (75,70,65...)
3. Bonus for TOP 100 of each puzzle (limiting to top-50 will probably desmotivate to some "non-top" participants)
This method will solve the problem of the dispersion for the top10 solver in an easy (a lot of bonus points) and in a hard puzzle (could be 0). With this system the possible trick I read on a previous post is not possible: Not to submit the solution for an easy puzzle to reduce the points for top players will have a negative consequence and not a positive one as it has with current system.

Summarizing, the solver will compite up finishing the puzzle and not only up to the time is finished. The points distribution (fixed points and bonus points (which I think is the weakest point of the current system) will be more representative of the puzzle difficult (as in other kind of puzzle contest). Also important for me is to maintain the motivation for no-top solver giving us the chance to get some bonus points.

Ibon

Thanks for your detailed suggestions.

Regarding point no 1, ideally yes. But practically (more from a solver's perspective) we cannot have an indefinite bonus timeframe. There has to be a limit - it can be different for different puzzles. We have had suggestions earlier that this upper limit can be 45/60/75/90/120.

Edited by rakesh_rai 2015-03-18 3:31 PM

A practical reason for having a bonus timeframe limit, even if it's something very long like 3 hours on the very hard puzzles, is that many of us are not available 24 hours a day for puzzles. With the current marathon system with a 60 minute limit, when I have a chunk of time for puzzles I will start as long as I have at least 45 minutes ahead of me for a puzzle rated "easy" and 60 for other puzzles. After that I may have a meeting with a colleague or a student and can't keep my office door shut, or I may need to go pick up my daughter at her daycare, also not a negotiable thing. So: it is important to know in advance how long to allocate from the time we start a puzzle to finish it competitively. (To give an example: Summon took me over 24 hours because after breaking it multiple times in the evening that I started, I really had to get some sleep ahead of an important presentation, give the presentation, meet with colleagues, and then go catch a flight back home. I finished the puzzle halfway through the flight and still had to wait a few more hours to input the solution once I was back on the ground with internet access. Okay, perhaps I could have not slept as much if it had really mattered, but that would have been really unpleasant.).

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Coded Snake
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Battleships
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

Yes. The box was indeed quite interesting in terms of the logic to decide what numbers go inside.


Paul: The above is one of the starting points for Hidoku. Apart from this, you also get to fill numbers fast in
- the bottom-right corner
- top left corner
- around the number 1
- you also get 400 easily (a cell to which only one cell can be connected)
- even in the bottom left corner lot of numbers can be placed

I do not think that to lower the bonus threshold for easy puzzles is a good idea. In this edition there have been 6 players which have obtained 400 points for having submitted at least 8 solutions but failed to achieve a single bonus. The reduction to 45' for easy puzzle will increase the number of these players; The other option ( to increase the threshold for difficult puzzles) is a better idea.

stefano

Very interesting. Some of the techniques are very useful. I got some of them but had to adopt T&E a few times. Consequently, I broke it twice.

I guess, the bottom right solving of 6's was last step, and if you try to do that first it will lead you to T & E
Though it has unique solution in itself and can be solved earlier but it becomes easy if you keep that for last :)

Among the Top 20, we have six participants with zero incorrect submissions:

Yes. Counting the word length would have been easier with Courier. This suggestion will be adopted for similar puzzles in future.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Scrabble with Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Fillomino
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Regional Battleships
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	A bit skewed
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

The reason I put "A bit skewed" is that I consider Fillomino and Nurikabe as classic types and all the other puzzles as variations / mixtures / novelties (to me at least).

Therefore I believe the set was a bit skewed against classics - with the large grids in play, I would prefer a larger portion of classic puzzles.

I believe Statue Park is now represented well in the community that it's considered a classic as well (just like Tapa). Hidato (here Hidoku) is also actually a classic, although not commonly found in the puzzle community for some reason.

However, yes, the easy puzzles are all classics and the difficult puzzles are mostly non-classics.

What made this year's marathon a let-down is because after 3 good previous editions, we'd love to think that we have everything sorted out by now.
The puzzle selection is not the problem but the difficulty is. We have 2 people finishing Summon and less than 20 finishing Snake and Hidato (okay, hidoku).
There have been suggestions about extending the time limit to 90, 120 etc. but personally I am not looking forward to this at all.
It is a tall order for any single puzzle lasting 100+ minutes to still be within the fun-zone. Imagine having to stare at the same tedious puzzle for 2 hours, no thank you.

Back to the difficulty level; this year seemed like it was a race for the authors to see who could come up with the hardest puzzle.
I prefer marathon puzzles to be like ones from Nikoli where the idea of "marathon" is slowly and steadily dismantling a big puzzle consisting of easy-medium logical steps.
I understand that not all puzzle types work like this, especially ones that require more global than local relationships.

Hidoku and Summon would still qualify as a marathon puzzle in this regard but their solving paths were way too narrow for the one hour limit.
However, both puzzles were beautiful and logically solvable enough to discourage trial and error. I would have enjoyed both Hidoku and Summon anywhere else than in a competition.
Then we have RC-Snake where I honestly don't see any logical way into the puzzle apart from bifurcating and bifurcating.
Scrabble was another guess-y type, but only because Scrabbles are generally intuitive>logic anyway.

Ok. Last thing I promise.
I don't agree with familiarity = easy (or easier).
So I find sentences like..." [this puzzle] was meant to be easier than [that puzzle] because it is more familiar" rather invalid.
Serkan can provide Tapas from childishly-easy to unreasonably-difficult any day, so I think we should consider each puzzle as a stand-alone when
categorizing them as a whole set.


Edited by tamz29 2015-03-20 1:41 AM

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Summon
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Statue Park
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

I found the regoinal snake very beautiful and logical. I have prepared a walkthrough
It' s possible to download it from http://web.freepass.it/sf2l/snake walkthrough.pdf

Thank you stefano for the walkthrough. I came to many of the same conclusions and the overall contour of my snake was similar. My critical error was a false assumption that "E" was the only letter that could represent "2". In all of my trials "A" had to be "3" or higher. And my solutions came close but obviously could not be fixed. But the excellent walkthrough describes the thinking required. Thanks again. Perhaps I will rescind my current lifetime boycott of snake puzzles and risk getting frustrated again. It's the only way to get better.

bob

What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?

Fair