Thanks to all 115 participants from 28 countries and Congratulations to all 46 finishers. USA (19), France (17) and Japan (11) had the most participants.

Although this was not a competitive test, Congratulations to Prasanna Seshadri, Anne Limoges and James McGowan for finishing in ~1.5 hours, the best in this test. Also special mention for Ruben Gafencu for being patient while submitting answers.

Thanks to the author Jonah Ostroff for creating this masterpiece!

Wonderful puzzle. It looks like it's impenetrable, but about 20-30 minutes in I found the break-in and I actually started filling the grid. I imagine this is a similar experience to many people doing my fun test of a 16x16 Poset Futoshiki from 6 years ago. It's largely logical; I had to bifurcate a bit in the middle of the solve, but I heard from others (including the author himself) that it's not really necessary and I missed a simpler solve path by focusing on a different portion of the puzzle.

Thanks for the comments, and for participating in this experiment! Thanks also to Rakesh for letting me break the rules a little with the IB, and to edderiofer and TheGreatEscaper for testing. And congrats to the top finishers for being way faster than I expected!

A few additional credits: the idea for this originated last summer when brainstorming for the We are Puzzlers Club tests. phenomist suggested a matchmaker where one of the grids was the matchmaker grid itself, and while we didn't end up using it then, I couldn't get the idea of a meta-matchmaker out of my head. Back in January I got around to putting this together, and edderiofer came up with the idea of presenting it as a "normal" puzzle in the IB and springing the twist after the competition started.

Genre inspirations: most of the room rule choices were inspired by Bram de Laat's Four-Colour Loop, one of my all-time favorite chimera puzzles. Detour is by wen (also featured in last year's WAPC tests), and Variety was invented for this contest because I couldn't think of any other rooms-and-numbers loop genres. And for circle clues, I found it helpful to get ideas by staring at TheGreatEscaper's Ludicrous Loop. Finally, Palindrome Pearls was invented because the circle clue placement was ridiculously constrained, so I wanted a genre where I could add room borders to fix contradictions. Not sure it's a viable genre on its own though.

Edited by ostroffj 2020-04-30 12:41 AM

This puzzle was a masterpiece! Big thanks for the tremendous effort of preparing it. I completed it in more or less 5 hours. I started it today at ~15:20, completed at ~20:10, but got a mistake in Row C only. Took me more than 20 minutes to figure out where it is, but it was easy to fix it, so I got the correct answer 7 minutes after the contest ended xD.

That puzzle was an awesome experience, thank you Jonah !
I honestly can't begin to comprehend how such a puzzle can be created, it is very impressive.

The feelings when I opened the pdf, saw the matchmaker grid and thought "uh, where is the puzzle ?", then read the first line of the second page... big emotional whiplash :D
(I don't know if some people expected the twist beforehand, but I was not one of them !)

The entry point was not trivial (constraint between Country, and ? clue limited to 6) but I suppose I had a good intuition on that day !
After that the puzzle solved quite smoothly.
I had a bit of a difficult moment in the C zone, luckily never destroying my progress in other parts ; and had to use trial and error to join several loop parts around the junction of ABDE regions in the end (I guess I started to be tired and didn't notice something logical with the masyu rule ?).

I must say, after all that I was quite surprised to see it had only taken me 90 minutes, it felt like a longer journey !

Solution Booklet.

I got another solution, could anyone check it, please? It's only different in the middle sector, starting in row 8 (key C): 213312; row 9: 11211222; row 10: 112341 and the ice-barn-clues in row 8 and 10 are visited twice. Thx

Edited by oe2 2020-04-30 9:16 PM

The ice barn clue in row 10 could not be visited twice, as the horizontal crossing would violate the Liar restriction, as it would be a room entry of length 1.

Oh yeah, I got exactly the same mistake... Noticing that this particular ice barn crossing is forbidden by liar rule was pretty tricky to me, that was the mistake I was searching 20 minutes for and it would definitely simplify the process of solving had I noticed it earlier.

Thanks