Hi Deb -
I also entered the yellow-outlined areas on #4 as my answers ....

In any case, compliments to David for some very clever puzzles (I ran out of time, so I will enjoy Deb's ESB later).

Best regards

Dave

Edited by davep 2010-11-22 3:24 AM

Aw, I had my first typo when entering one of the FLIP 'n' Fills. And it knocked me down a bonus point bracket!

If it helps, my typo implies that a number ending in a 0 was flipped (which is clearly false). But I can understand being strict about this, and it's not like I'm really in contention for a top score anyway.

Deb - I think there's a bug with regards to the puzzle rating system. I can't seem to give a rating for the two puzzles I had a manual override on the score.

For what it's worth, I thought #3 was a 6/10 and #12 was an 8/10.

Will have a look before next test. For now, I've added your ratings for the two specified puzzles.

Correct answer 2FGHJ. Your answer 2FGHI.
Marked correct.

Done
Many players did this. Given points to both you and others

Many players did this. Given points to you and all others (even who didn't claim).

Checked all submissions for manual overrides. There is none as far as I can see.
Results are frozen now.

Admin, I think willwc's point is that there is no row I: the rows read ABCDEFGHJK. So by "I" he meant "the thing after H".

Congratulations to Thomas Snyder and Hideaki Jo for topping in FLIP. Only 2 players to complete, and by what a margin - 18 minutes remaining. Only few seconds separating them apart.
Nikola continued his trend of single-puzzle-mistake from Renban. He would have otherwise got 9 minutes bonus.

In Indian ladder, Rakesh converted his 'good performance in Renban' into a 'great performance in FLIP'. And we've Keshava at 3rd position among Indian participants. Well done, Keshava and hope to see you do better in upcoming tests.

That was careless from me. Sorry willwc. Thanks ostroffj for pointing.
3 players did the same mistake.
pushpa.mr
RJH0723
willwc
All of them get full points.
willwc's score is 360 now, and he moves to 15th position.

Slightly lesser participants compared to the last two LMI tests.
98 out of 115 players got non-zero scores. Thank you everyone for participating.

Those who could not participate should try to solve and enjoy the puzzles at leisure.

Next monthly test

And I don't suppose I could get credit for #3? It was the same kind of mistake, though less clear cut: instead of "K" I wrote "J", which unfortunately is an actual row. But then, if the last row ends in a 1, then I couldn't have thought J was flipped, or else that answer would be a two-digit number starting with a zero.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the test and for the feedback afterward.

I'm sorry that the test was so short. Given the number of other tests going on this past weekend as well as over the last couple of weeks and upcoming weeks, I thought that a shorter, simpler test would be appreciated. I also hoped a shorter test would inspire more people to give the test a try.

I'm glad to see that many of the puzzles were well-liked. From what I can gather, the FLIP Mirror 0-2-5 were among the favorites, so perhaps I'll make more of those to put on The Griddle when I have some spare time.

Thanks again to all!

David

@ostroffj: In the other cases, it was clear that the answer was incorrectly entered since no row called 'I' exists. In your answer, since a row called 'J' exists, it would be unfair to give credit since it was not clear if that was your intended answer or if it was a typo. It is not a personal decision, but to be fair we cannot award you those points.

In any of my future tests with LMI, I will be sure to very clearly label rows as needed, and will only accept the correct answer as indicated by the Instruction Booklet to ensure that the scores given to all are fair.

I very much appreciated that the test was short. I'm far more able to do an hour-long test. I mean, I can now finish it while my wife is watching some TV show I don't like!

David and LMI team for conducting such a nice contest I enjoyed the puzzles which involved math a lot. I liked the fences puzzle a lot also. I must say it is a very well designed one. Even I did not try to solve the ESB during the test I must also say that it is a good constructed one. Actually I usually make some errors while solving such puzzles in a short time. These are not my type I think. But I enjoyed solving this one after the test. Conrats to all toppers and every participant.

Regards,

Zafer

Edited by zhergan 2010-11-23 12:06 AM

I was also a fan of the test's length, even though it certainly flew by. I didn't learn about the test until Sunday morning, and only had about 90 minutes of consecutive free time in which to participate, so much longer and I would've been right out.

I was just looking at the results. One surprising observation was regarding FLIP Strips.

It seemed a very easy puzzle to me. Just add the numbers on the left - you get 90. And when you add the strips, you get 91. So it is very clear that a 1 has to go. After that it is trivial. But this was attempted by the fewest number of participants - even less than the two 65-pointers !!

This was one of the two outcomes I expected. I thought either it would be found as too easy or as too difficult depending on if a particular solver figured out the trick or not. Between FLIP Strips and FLIP 'n' Fill Sequence, I think those puzzles were good challenges for me to make something non-grid-based (and possibly good to make more for posting on The Griddle), but would be bad in a competition setting since everyone is used to not doing so much math.

(Random side thought though, I was thinking of releasing a special edition combined IB/PB with added notes/commentary, answer keys for the test puzzles, and possibly extra puzzles in the types most well-liked by test-takers. Would anyone be interested in something like this, or would it be a waste of time?)

David, I think thats a good idea. We never had thought abt having anything like that for any test.
You can also include some general stats from the score page.
Of course, many players would be interested in the extra puzzles :-)

Looking forward to your special edition!

It wasn't quite trivial. There were two possibilities that gave very similar looking equations (the sums were related by a single transposition), and I happened to pick the wrong one, initially thinking it was good.

There were several puzzles on this test with some obvious tricks if you had planned ahead. Flip Strips fits that category, but the thing is while its clear you can use the total addition to know how much is "missing" in the solution, what you don't know until doing all the addition is that the result here is 90 and 91 making the puzzle very easy. Since it probably takes a half minute to know if the puzzle is very easy or somewhat hard, I'm guessing many solvers went to other places.

I personally found the Slitherlink to be the one that was most trivial if you had thought about how the gimmick would work. Certainly there will be one of two mirror axes unless it's an odd sized grid, with no line segments on that axis since it must form a loop. This means 3's can't touch that axis, which lets you exclude the vertical option rather quickly. Then you just copy the top numbers into the bottom and solve half a slitherlink, doubling the count for the answer entry. Hardly worth 65 points, if you planned ahead. The other 65 pointer was much harder.

That was a neat little trick...to solve half a slitherlink...I spent quite a lot of time on this, solving the full slitherlink the hard way.

Another thing that I am not fully able to understand is the (partial) bonus system.

Taking FLIP as an example, if X solved 9 puzzles in 40 minutes (but failed to solve the 10th one), he gets 4X10=40 bonus points. On the other hand, Y, who solved 9 identical puzzles in 39 minutes and ended up solving the 10th one (worth 35 points) in the nick of time, gets zero bonus points.

The main doubt that I have is whether we should use the last correct answer submission time OR the 6th/9th correct answer submission time as the reference point. Y was actually faster to 9 puzzles. But X got 40 bonus points for a failure while Y got 35 puzzle points for a success.

Rakesh - thanks for bringing it up again (when it seemed to me that you have gained few ranks in FLIP because of the partial bonus system :-)

The bonus system works well when we assume that a player submits as soon as they solve a puzzle. That is an incorrect assumption, and definitely not true in case of puzzle tests.

May be some members will have other solutions to the partial bonus system. It will be nice to discuss something and finalize before the next test.