I didn't notice either - until it was too late.

There was a thing quite early on in the solve where you have a choice between either entirely surrounding an empty square with shaded squares, or else leaving 3 rooms empty in a row. The latter option was apparently quite subtle as I must have passed over it at least four or five times. Either that, or I'm an idiot. The new version is basically a fiddle to change as little of the solving experience (after wrongly assuming the 3 empty rooms in a row) as possible - I'd estimate about 80% of the puzzle solves the same.

Edited by detuned 2010-10-10 5:39 AM

I obviously had the benefit of the "improved" test, but that won't keep me from my typical counting error (on the highest possible valued puzzle to boot). Got through all the solvable puzzles though. I think the marathon Kakuro was guilty of being too cute (not a good thing in a competition), but otherwise a lot of very fun puzzles to solve. Thanks for the puzzles Tom.

Edited by motris 2010-10-10 10:25 AM

Yeah, I found the spot and fixed it up with the new image, it should be ok now :)

By the way, the masyu marathon was pretty fun, I had a couple of warm, fuzzy "Oooh" moments solving it :P

I made it too although my PC froze as soon as I copy/pasted the pw. Had to reset and reboot and lost 5-6 minutes. Therefore I guess this time motris will beat me

Nice set of puzzles, although I did not always find a straight relationship between the points awarded and the difficulty level. Thanks Tom, better luck for the future

stefano
ps: how do I rate the puzzles?

Edited by forcolin 2010-10-10 2:55 PM

Nice set of puzzles. Made one error while submitting the answer to lost 100 points. Do take care while submitting your answers.

In the submission page, below each puzzle name there are 10 dots.
The left-most dot is for 1-star and the right-most dot is for 10-stars. You can move your mouse over the dot to see.

So for the Numberlink puzzle it means that any correct solution will be accepted and points will be awarded?
Or is that puzzle out of the competition like the incorrect ones?

Since you uploaded a new test booklet with a corrected LITS, are you going to somehow adjust the scores of those who completed the test before the new PDF was uploaded?

If you start the competition now, should you just skip the broken puzzles or are there still points available for these anyway?

We will consider points only for the updated puzzle booklet.
Points will be adjusted for all participants who participated in the test before the updated booklet was made available.

Results are published -
http://logicmastersindia.com/M201010P1/score.asp

We've followed a simple method
Nurikabe = 0 points for all
NumberLinks = 20 if player solved with old pdf and answer startsed with 1114, 0 if player solved with new pdf

This may not be the fairest way, but I guess there is no fair way to compute how much time a player spent on broken puzzle to compensate them for that.

We've disabled the ranks this time - you can sort by Points though.

Thank you everyone for participating.
And we (debmohanty, amitsowani, detuned) apologize again for the mistakes which could have been avoided.

There were 184 participants - 151 of whom got non-zero scores.

Here are some stats :
of countries - 35.
Top 3 (Based on #of non-zero entries)
Ind - 21
Japan - 18
USA - 16

Beginning of last week there were many new users registering from Japan that at one point I was thinking there will be more participants than Japan than India.
But Japan has highest Avg Score "754", and it won't be difficult to imagine how famous Nikoli is there.

Please provide feedback about the puzzles.
If anyone needs hints / steps to solve any puzzles, please don't hesitate to post here.

From the score page, it looks LITS is the least solved puzzle (okay, after the new pdf is uploaded)
No prizes for guessing the most solved puzzle - yes it is Sudoku!
P18 - Slitherlink was most incorrectly entered puzzle.

Hi Organizers,

first if all hats off for preparing such a wonderful puzzle set.

I have one doubt regaring the MASYU, It also has a multiple answers.

please tell me how can post it, so that you can correct me if i am wrong.

awaiting for the next test.

3 Cheers,
Keshav

@Keshav : I assume you are talking about P06 Masyu, because that is marked as 0 for you. We are absolutely certain that the P06 Masyu is correct and has only one solution.
You can upload your other solution (in image format) in this forum.

Hi,

I am extremely sorry, misunderstud the rule, i just read it should take 90 degree turn in Black circle and should not turn in white circle.

Thanks a lot for your reply.

Best Regards,
Keshav

This post sort of tripped me up. Apparently, it was not the 3rd row and column but the ones specified in the PB. I guess I must have misunderstood, I actually had the correct answer until I noticed the huge red announcement in the sidebar. :D Oh well.

I've never solved Nikoli puzzles, and keenly realized the importance of experience.
Especially, Akari and Heyawake (which I couldn't solve within the time-limit) were thought to be tough for non-Nikolist.

Anyway, Thank you for the nice puzzles!
Yuhei Kusui