Prasanna, thank you for your help in testing and translation of texts into English!
Before leaving, I found time on a detailed response about Crossmind.
I'll start with history. In Russia it is published a series of magazines "Handmade". They content are Keywords, Fillwords, Tetris and other word puzzles. From the first issues they published Crossmind’s invented by me. Typically several pages using words of different lengths.
Ivan, I advise you to make a Crossmind with 4-6 words, as in our magazines. When you feel the puzzle, then make more difficult tasks:
1. In each Mastermind given words should denote the same thing in different languages.
2. Crossmind should not be split into two independent puzzles – Mastermind and Crossword. Therefore, some Mastermind must be solved at the expense of crossword intersections. That is, it is necessary to construct a crossword grid, which guarantees uniqueness Crossmind.
3. Black crossword cells must draw the letters L, M, I.
I spent several days creating Crossmind. I was engulfed in a process so that refused lunch.
I will come back to the discussion on 4 May.

The second part of the question was not answered, whether the loop may touch itself. I do know that the region is made of 16 cells, but I don't know how the loop works. My question was something like this. Left part is a correct Masyu-like loop, while right part is an incorrect Snake-like loop. Which of them is the rule in the puzzle?

Re Crossmind: That's why I'm interested to know the intended logical path to solve Crossmind, because it just looks completely beyond any approach I can think of.

I would guess that you missed some of the Mastermind deductions. If my notes are correct, there are just 7 ambiguous words, of which only two have more than two options.

No, I'm very confident my "solves" for Mastermind were right (because I just used programming to brute force each combination). But even with all of that, I still can't figure out where to start placing any of them.

About the "Crossmind" discussion:
The crossword part of this puzzle is completely logically solvable without using of uniqueness.
You should start with second "left-to-right" word (middle top of the grid).
The first and the last letters of this word must be 4th letters in some pair of words.
There are only 3 possible words, 2 of them very quickly lead to the contradiction.
Next - everything goes without problems.

On the competition as a whole - it is exactly as it should be.


Edited by dm_litv 2016-05-01 3:46 PM

I fully agree.

[a bit OT, a question for admin] Is there scope for competitions dedicated to optimization puzzles only?

Stefano

Edited by forcolin 2016-05-01 8:19 PM

I am unable to understand about it, could you reply me with proper or actual question?

I think the optimization puzzles are the highlight of Riad's tests.
This time there were only 2, and they were 'solvable', but I'd like to see more too!

Thanks to all the participants! Next year it will be necessary to return to the format with three optimization puzzles.

I agree with both the last posts. However I miss a bit the good old DOM.

Does anyone have a solution for the Trid-Fir? I keep getting stuck.

This is a very tough contest. I am also struggling with the Voyage puzzle. Even after looking at the answer string I am not sure how to do this puzzle. Is there a solutions page somewhere. After spending several days on these and getting nowhere it would be nice to know what it is I am not getting. Any help would be great.

It was a tough contest, much harder than other contests because you have a week instead of an hour to solve them.
Perhaps show us an image of where you are up to and we can suggest some next steps?