I would like to thank Tiit and Rakesh for testing the puzzles and providing valuable feedback, especially pointing out errors/non-uniqueness in 2-3 puzzles.
Their timings also aligned with my anticipation of puzzle difficulty and I was in general happy with the point distribution except for one instance where in hindsight I made the mistake of overruling their timing in Half Dominoes -3 where I expected that it would be one of the easier puzzles with all the column and row sums being given.

We were aware that the set is a lot tougher than the previous round, but the only option we had was to reduce the number of puzzles, which would mean departure from the set pattern for PR rounds. This is something we could consider in future years.

I wanted to introduce a different solving strategy in each puzzle type and succeeded for most puzzle types except Futoshiki. I was especially happy with Statue Park where each of the 5 puzzles including the exploratory variants had a different solving strategy.

Partiti was the favorite puzzle type in the set. Thanks to Thinh Van Duc Lai for introducing the puzzle type to all of us. I would also like to thank Ashish whose Partiti puzzles from WPC 2017 inspired the puzzles in this test.

The theme was obvious in some types like Statue Park and Battleship but a bit more obscure in Futoshiki and Ripple Effect. This is the 10th year of LMI so I though the theme would be appropriate for this contest.

Thanks to all the participants for adding colour to the event and providing valuable feedback. Congrats to all the participants who were able to complete the set in the allotted time. I hope others enjoyed solving the rest of the puzzles offline. Do post here if you are stuck on any of the puzzles and I would be glad to provide hints on my intended solving path.

The time count in the homepage is confusing. I wanted to start test while it was declaring the test will end in 50 minutes. But, I could not start the test in the contest page, as it said I should have started 40 minutes earlier.

Can anyone give some hints for solving Partiti-3? I was able to prove that the bottom left corner has a 2 under an 8, and the bottom right corner has a 3 under a 7 (i.e. those four boxes only have a single number in them). But past that I'm pretty stuck.

Edited by ghirsch 2018-03-01 12:59 AM

Since all the number appear in a cluster (11, 10, 9, 8 and 7) identify the possible combinations for these numbers so that can appear together in a 2X2 box of cells.

Thanks Amit, I really enjoyed the puzzle set. The Partiti puzzles in particular were a lot of fun, though they feel very slow to solve to me.

(Also I can see that it would be a tough set for for the usual PR target group.)

What's the password for this? It's not showing on the contest page itself.

PW = 2isharderthan1

nice