What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Average
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Perfect answer keys
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I'll be honest--this is my least favorite category even before starting. To me, "casual" puzzles seem to me to be all about guessing, trial and error, counting and hoping, and more tiral and error. So I was really looking forward to the word puzzles which I thought would at least be logical but found them staggeringly difficult. I started with the last page. Missing Letters OK, kind of fun. Word Search I spent almost 40 minutes on a 2-point puzzle and could not even finish it. Several possibile locations for many of the words leads to dozens and dozens of combinations to avoid overlap. I could not find the right one and finally gave up. Final Double Letter Scrabble another 30 minutes trying to place my last word LATUR to no avail. May be just a bad round for me but very discouraging.

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Letter Scrabble
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Perfect answer keys
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

There were some really nice puzzles in here, but the misleading point distribution broke the contest for me. (To a large part I feel I should just have realized this and not sunk so much time into the undervalued puzzles.)

Edited by rob 2018-05-14 3:55 PM

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Double Letter Scrabble
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

This seemed much harder than the previous sets. It required a lot of right insight from the start to even begin too many puzzles. I find this slows solving down a lot more in a full set as it is harder to get into a solving flow. It also leads to problems with point values as they can severely increase solving times if you don't get it from the start. It's always hard to rate these puzzles though.

Also, I will never learn how to properly count, no matter how hard I try.

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Letter Weights
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Thanks Rakesh and LMI for the high quality test. Though the puzzles were difficult on the whole for a PR round, I found the puzzles which I solved to have a logical start or logical solve.

This may be the round for everyone who dont have to remember confusing and contradicting rules of many other puzzles. Overall a good set and nice experience.

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Average
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Average
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Double Letter Scrabble
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

So... the guessing round. It was clear from the start that this wouldn't be a strong round for me, as I hate casual puzzles and have only a mild interest in word puzzles. Some puzzles that I attempted during the test were ok, with double letter scrabble #18 being the most memorable one for me. Somewhere in the middle of the test, however, I lost interest in the puzzles and the round, and got tired of all the intuition-based word placements.
Certainly my least favourite round so far :(

What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Shortest Distances
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Answer keys could have been better
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Can you elaborate which answer keys were horrible, so that we can work on improving on it in future.

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Scrabble
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Perfect answer keys
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Scrabble
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

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
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Knight Paths
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Missing Letters
What was your opinion about the answer key extraction?	Mostly perfect answer keys
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I think, in my opinion, this was a very hard test.

Not based in my low punctuation. I am not a fast solver, and I am better solving sudoku than other puzzles.
I participate in this contest to learn and enjoy with variations of puzzles. I solved only a few of them in time, and later when test over, I finish others, because the important thing is fun.

But, in this case, when I finish, and see Results score, I was surprised that NOBODY obtains 100 points or more as usually. Top 20 to 30 players (I don't say names, you know who they are) solved ALL puzzles in less than 90 minutes. But now NOBODY answers ALL 22 puzzles. I think that this means something.
Also, number of penalties is bigger than other tests. Almost everyone had one or more.

On the other hand, I think that puzzles 7 and 8 (Arithmetic Square) are a little variation with letters instead of numbers as usually. This is one of the puzzles I can solve, but in this case I couldn't. Instruction booklet example could have at least one letter, to prepare to these variation. It is expected that puzzles are bigger and hardest than examples, but not with a different variation, including that two puzzles are connected, like in this case. Is an interesting variation, but for me, hardest than 5 points.
Counting puzzles aren't difficult because logic to solve, but need time to counting all combinations. And in most cases they have a low punctuation. So, if test have several counting puzzles, time is less to solve, including time to write answers in submit page and send it. If you see results score, puzzles 2,3 and 5 had less % correct.

I can tell you Rakesh in a good cuban spanish: "se te fue la mano" (translated literally: your hand went away). This phrase means that you do something above normal.
Anyway I think that test quality is good including answer keys. But to solve in more that 90 minutes.
Thanks anyway Rakesh.

P.D. I solved Word search only after test over because I didn't see second SATE word diagonally on left side.

I really don't like that the rules changed between the Instruction Book and Puzzle Book for Arithmetic Square. Three more sentences were added!

There are many non-native-English speakers doing these contests, who may have difficulty or questions.
I found these new rules slightly ambiguous also, if the two puzzles used the same code or different codes, although eventually decided that the reference table with only one empty column pointing to both sides answered that.

I appreciate you maybe didn't want to make another example puzzle, but I think it is better to have full rules and no example (USPC does this sometimes?) then rules and example for a similar type?

Congratulations to Neil Zussman, Walker Anderson, Bram de Laat and James McGowan for taking the top four places. And, a special mention for Ivan Koswara, who got the highest number of puzzles correct (20).

Among Indian participants, Congratulations to Prasanna Seshadri, Amit Sowani and Rohan Rao for taking the top 3 places.

Thanks to the 165 participants. Anzhi Liu (China) was the first to take the test while Anubhav Balodhi (India) was the last person to take the test. The median score of the test was 38.

Thanks Rakesh Rai for the puzzles, and all participants who provided valuable feedback.

Participants may share feedback on the results page and rate the puzzles on the contest page.

This is a valid point. Perhaps it could have been handled better. However, the only area of confusion could have been whether the letters have the same value in both puzzles. And we tried to make it clear in words, and also visually. I definitely wanted the letters to be a surprise in the PB, so the IB example was more normal. There was no change in the basic rules though.

On a separate note, if we do a post-test analysis, this puzzle had a 100% correct submission rate, and also had a good 67 correct submissions, which is high in the context of this set. So, I am hoping it was understood right most of the time.

Thanks for a very detailed feedback. I can relate to most of your points.

For counting puzzles, ~10 minutes usefully spent should have given the 12 points. But it required "logical" counting, where the approach does not miss valid cases. But most participants gave up on counting if they got one or two incorrect answers. Some started guessing, and ultimately, counting puzzles ended up as the main contributor to the high number of penalties (39 being the highest), and less accuracy. Maybe, I should have kept only two instead of four counting puzzles.

SATE was the intended start for #22. Unfortunately, many participants did not get enough time to attempt this.

I enjoyed the test very much. I wonder if there will be a solutions book. I am stuck finding one of the 54 triangles. Thanks.

Very pleased and definitely surprised to get my first LMI win (unless I've forgotten something!) :-) Thanks to Rakesh for the test.

I don't think I have any comments that haven't already been said. I didn't like the Arithmetic Square twist. I think having letters is fine, but having the same letters take the same values across both puzzles was a bit weird, because usually you expect different puzzles to solve completely independently of each other. Until I solved it, I wasn't 100% sure I understood the rules correctly, so I can empathise with any non-native English speakers who were even more confused.

There will be a solutions booklet by Saturday. However, we are not planning to include all triangles or knight paths there. To answer your query, we will try to provide a break-up of the 54 triangles for puzzle #2 separately.

Oh, yeah. The fact that there is extra text in PB is a bad thing because some non-native English speakers might first translate the IB to their own language or something to get more understanding. Extra text added to PB means they have to understand the extra text first, which can be a problem for some people that are not fluent in English.

I don't think I have any concern about puzzles being related now, considering that some puzzles in other tests (e.g. WPC) might have multiple grids and also partial points for solving grids, effectively making them "related puzzles" too; the only difference being the multiple grids being numbered as a single puzzle there but multiple puzzles here.

puzzle #2






Attachments
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PR5 2.png (18KB - 7 downloads)

Solution Booklet is available now.

Puzzle 12: E's of OBESE touch diagonally.

An older (incorrect) version was uploaded for #12 in SB. The correct solution is attached.





Attachments
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PR5 12.png (5KB - 4 downloads)