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Posts: 10 Country : United States | ostroffj posted @ 2020-04-30 12:41 AM 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 |
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Posts: 2 Country : Poland | Swistakk posted @ 2020-04-30 2:56 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. |
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Posts: 49 ![]() ![]() Country : France | Kithyane posted @ 2020-04-30 10:58 AM 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 ! |
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Country : India | Administrator posted @ 2020-04-30 1:23 PM |
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Posts: 4 Country : Germany | oe2 posted @ 2020-04-30 9:15 PM 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 |
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Posts: 18 Country : Canada | sstackho posted @ 2020-04-30 9:22 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. |
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Posts: 2 Country : Poland | Swistakk posted @ 2020-04-30 9:28 PM oe2 - 2020-04-30 9:15 PM 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 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. |
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Posts: 4 Country : Germany | oe2 posted @ 2020-04-30 11:55 PM Thanks |