I'm having trouble understanding how exactly the outside clues work for the Summon puzzle. Can someone please help explain?

The digits in a row (or column) are grouped into numbers which may consist of multiple digits, separated by blanks. These are then summed up to form the clues. E.g., if a row is "1w23ww21" (with "w" for white cells), the clue would be 1+23+21 = 45.

Oh! Thank you very much.

On the Max Arrow Castle Wall puzzle, can arrows in a cell indicate that the maximum total lengths of segments in all directions within the puzzle area equal 0, or must the maximum length be a positive number? Thanks. TheSubro

Edited by thesubro 2016-01-28 12:30 AM

Maximum value can be 0. In this case, arrows are drawn in all possible directions.

By all possible directions, does that include, say, an edge clue pointing to the edge itself?

Good question. "All possible directions" mean "All 4 directions" even for edge clues and corner clues.

So Symmetry Area is just Fillomino with regions having 180-degree rotational symmetry?

In the Meandering Words example, R3C4 can be unshaded with the solution still unique? (So I can understand a region without shaded cell from the example.)

You are right in both questions. Regarding Meandering Words, some regions do not contain a shaded cell in the actual test. This means you can start the word from any cell in that region.

Points Table
Araf	15	30
Symmetry Area	25	60
Compass	35	35
Sunglasses	25	75
Graffiti Snake	25	50
New Tren	25	60
Statue Park	35	45
Summon	30	60
Meandering Words	30	50
Curve Data	20	45
Max Arrow Castle Wall	30	90
Angle Loop	35	70
Total	1000

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
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Compass
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Angle Loop

A very nice test. Puzzles were nice in difficulty, and especially nice in aesthetics and solving path; I enjoyed every minute of it. Some puzzles, thanks to their genres (read: Symmetry Area, Compass, Curve Data, Angle Loop for example), are much more solvable using intuition, making educated guesses instead of using deductions and theorems. Others are solvable using deduction with a very clean solving path, most notably Max Arrow Castle Wall 1; first attempt by intuition didn't lead anywhere, and second attempt by logic immediately led to the solution (with a few mistakes because there were 3 minutes left).

I've been trying to compile a list of favorite puzzles in this test, but I would mention a majority of the puzzles this way, so that's perhaps enough to say that the whole test was a very pleasant experience. But a special mention to Araf 2, anyway; that's an absolutely gorgeous puzzle, with givens that form a perfect pattern, that when I saw it I thought "wow, this can have a unique solution?" (It does.)

The only puzzle that I didn't solve was Max Arrow Castle Wall 2, which I didn't have time to attempt anyway; I should revisit it.

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
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Meandering Words
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Summon

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
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Max Arrow Castle Wall
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Sunglasses
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 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
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	New Tren
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Summon
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Sunglasses

Really nice test, and I'm glad to see that volume 4 is being worked on! :-) I much prefer the ones that can be solved completely logically, rather than the ones with rubbers symbols, but all the puzzles were good quality anyway!
The grid lines/ lattice points on the New Tren and the first Curve Data didn't print for me (although bizarrely they did on the second Curve Data), did anyone else have that problem? I had to draw them in myself, which I think meant I submitted the 2nd Angle Loop about 1 second after time, which is a bit annoying! But a fun 2 hours anyway.

In most likelihood, this happens when you print directly from the browser. See this post for details. You might want to re-print the pdf after saving the file on your machine.

I'm sure you're right, thanks for the info, I'll try this next time. Just weird that it's not happened before.

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
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Max Arrow Castle Wall
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Compass

An excellent set of puzzles. My thanks to the authors/organizers. I will also highly recommend the books to anyone who has not checked them out before.

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
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Symmetry Area
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Angle Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Max Arrow Castle Wall

An expectedly brilliant test. I love the books, the contest matched their quality. Thank you!

It's hard to choose favourites; somehow I always tend towards the ones that gave me most trouble. That's the Symmetry Area here: I couldn't solve either of those until revisiting them later, kept not seeing ways that things could resolve. And once you've figured out 11/19, the 8 doesn't work! Then I'll vote for Angle Loop anytime because the type is so good, as were the puzzles.

Other than that, the harder Meandering Words seemed easy, but I still broke it. It's hard to find errors in those. And somewhat annoyingly I fixed an error in Summon 2 first in one entry code line, then in the other.

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
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Graffiti Snake
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Max Arrow Castle Wall

I was a bit apprehensive going into this for two reasons. 1) I haven't managed to solve a single medium+ Angle Loop till now. 2) I am really bad at intuition/guessing. Considering that, the test went fine except for two puzzles. One of them is that Symmetry Area puzzle which was beautiful to look at until I had to attack it with around 10 erasings (mainly because I didn't want to get to the Angle Loop) in multiple re-visits across the test duration. I'm probably just missing something simple and doing silly things repeatedly. I managed to solve the easier Angle Loop which is a big achievement in itself, and I still can't get the bigger one to work. If not for my shortcomings in these two puzzles I'd have a really nice result.

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
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Summon
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Max Arrow Castle Wall
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Compass

One of the best contests of recent times. Very innovative and very logical. based more on logical solving capacity rather than on speed. I liked it a lot, in spite of spending an awful lot of time on the first symmetry area (I managed to solve it only after the end) and still can't figure out how to sort the bigger brother. Very elegant also the second angle loop. Thanks to the authors

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
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	New Tren
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Max Arrow Castle Wall
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Compass

As expected, the last Angle Loop broke me up for the last 10-15 minutes. It's a type that really doesn't suit me. I took a while afterwards to get it. I enjoyed all puzzles without a little eraser as the other ones caused some unnecessary problems. Not a bad performance overall though.