This tents puzzle actually started with no number clues in the first construction, and makes use of "too crowded if a tent goes this way" logic. The final version got some numbers to steer some of the bottom, and also to distract from the "no numbers" approach. Maybe this image will help you get started.

Very interesting use of too-crowded logic. A quick look at the green tree shows the cell the corresponding tent should be in.

The numbers given in the bottom were definitely distracting, because there were of no use to get the start.

Thanks motris !! The puzzle solves very smoothly once I use this starting point - and it took hardly 2-3 minutes. Earlier, I was focusing more on the "4" column to get started. Perhaps that was an intended distraction.

In Nurikabe, it was interesting to notice (may be many solvers don't notice during the test) that the easy puzzle had only 3s, the hard puzzle had only 4s and the mutant, obviously, had only 5s.
The Art of Puzzles?

Yes, we had decided that.
For this test, we wanted to have a different tie breaker (#of mutants solved, then #of Hard solved, then #of Easy solved). But we had not announced that before the test. So We removed all the tie-breakers and gave same rank for same points. But the table is still sorted by TimeTillLCS in case points are same.

Btw, I noticed that TimeTillLCS is 78 for you, which is way below others' TimeTillLCS in top 100

Great puzzles, thanks Thomas! That's why people love your puzzles.

Pay attention to my time, I think that everything would be different if the test lasted 100 minutes. Mutant number crossword is "worthily" for the rest of the my time.

Nikola Zivanovic

I noticed that I've submitted the wrong column in the Hard ABC Connect (instead of column A , it's the one next to A to the right). Any chance to verify if that's correct and acceptable ?

Good set of puzzles. (esp the mutant versions)

-Sudhir

ignore my last post. Even with that, another mistake i made while submitting is with "E" instead of "C". No points for such carelessness :-)

Sudhir

Puzzles were exceptionally good, fun to solve, and in a competitive environment.

I liked Nurikabe (Hard), Tents (Hard), ABC Connect (Mutant), Tents (Mutant) and Minesweeper (Mutants) as the best 5.
I kept going wrong in Number Skeleton (Mutant).

I loved the Hard Nurikabe. It had a nice simple logical solving pattern, but the puzzle was just too cute for me to solve without smiling :-)

Thanks Thomas, for the wonderful weekend :-)

Boy is it a relief to hear how tough everyone found the Mutant Number Skeleton. It took me about twice as long to do as any other puzzle in the set during my testsolve, and I had to do trial and error. When I was told of the intended solution I figured I had just royally messed up, but it looks like I'm not the only one.

I commented to motris that experience solving nikoli puzzles, especially those that they publish online, would confer a substantial advantage for this test. Not surprising to see H.Jo win, with that in mind.

It was certainly the outlier in your times, but was actually one of Wei-Hwa's faster solves (under two minutes, in line with the Hard of the same type). I figured it was the most high variance of the mutants, since the solve is so dependent on noticing a property of the number list and does not solve in any other way like brute force which can be applied on a lot of the other puzzles.

The key insight to the Number Skeleton mutant is to see that all the 6 digit numbers have digits strictly increasing from left-to-right. This means as you follow a path of five-cell entries from top-left to bottom-right, the digits along that entire path must also be strictly increasing, but this places a lot of constraints on the digits at the intersections, particularly the first digit of the entry going down the rightmost column. Along this thinking you should be able to get that the intersecting 3 cell entries are 131 and 615 and from those get the other 3 cell entries which will help complete the puzzle.

Edited by motris 2010-10-19 4:00 AM

6 Germans in top 10.
What do you have to say about that with WPC round the corner? ;-)

At the WPC, there cannot be more than 4 in the top 10

Also, 3 of the four USA participants were involved in creating / testing the puzzles.

alternatively, you can simply go back to the original plan and award the maximum bonus only in the case of 10/10 puzzle solved. This also considering how kind you have been in forgiving typing mistakes, this reduces the impact of wrong transcriptions.
stefano