How can I start the monthly puzzle? is that a paid puzzle or what?

Details here: https://logicmastersindia.com/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=381

With the contest period over, we can now conclude this contest.

Congratulations for Endo Ken (EKBM), Walker Anderson (WA1729), and Freddie Hand (Puzzle_Maestro) for the podium finish, as well as Tomoya Kimura (Panista) and Taigo Ando (Tigereye) for also finishing the test! And congratulations for Prasanna Seshadri (Prasanna16391), Ashish Kumar (ashaash11ash), Kishore Kumar (kishy72), and Swaroop Guggilam (swaroop2011) as the top 4 Indian solvers! And of course, thank you for everyone taking this test; we at Puzzlers Club are happy to share our creations.

To be honest, I forgot how we came up with this theme idea. We were brainstorming of various possible theme ideas; one group of themes was purely thematic, the other was about rule gimmicks. I suppose this came up from the "purely thematic" group of themes and we liked it enough. There was a theme idea from the "rule gimmick" group as well, but it proved too ambitious. Maybe for another time.

Once we picked the theme, it was then finding the genres. Some types, like Water (Aquarium) and Grass (Tents), were easy. Others, like Psychic (Persistence of Memory) and Dragon (Castle Wall), were less clear. Fighting (Rock, Paper, Scissors) and Fairy (Starry Night) had to refer to much less known types. But all types were existing types; we didn't invent any, and we didn't use variants. (We wanted to use "PC-original" types, like Haisu and Detour that you might have first seen in WAPC, but we ended up not finding a good type to pair it to.)

As for the puzzles, we just let anyone pick any type they wished to construct. We didn't give any restriction on theme and size, although several puzzles ended up showing their type symbols as the aesthetic theme.

For my puzzle (Starry Night) specifically, it was constructed in an interesting way, and admittedly "cheat-y". It was very easy to program a solver for this genre: there are only 90 ways to place 6 symbols in a 6x6 grid such that each row/column has exactly one symbol and no two symbols touch diagonally. Therefore there are at most 90x90x90 = 729,000 valid solution grids (90 for each of star, sun, moon; this is further reduced because in some grids, symbols will overlap and thus do not form a valid solution). A computer can easily go through all these. So I constructed several potential puzzles based purely from the layout of givens, and tossed them to the solver. Once the solver reported a particular puzzle had a unique solution, only then I verified by hand that it had a solution path that I deemed logical enough. (As it turns out, some people complained to me it still felt brute-forcy. Oops.) Other authors can talk about their puzzles if they wish. Solution Booklet should be up soon, too.

Overall, I'm happy with the puzzle quality of this test, and this couldn't be done without all the people that helped. If you're interested in joining our community on Discord, let me know.

While contribution from Puzzlers Club as a whole to LMI has ended for this year (or I don't foresee any more, at least), I will have a puzzle test authored by myself, unrelated from Puzzlers Club, in early November. But even before that, we have a lot of other tests coming up, so keep puzzling!

I think Persistence of Memory has multiple solutions.

-- I forgot to consider snake's movement, sorry.

Edited by Kouta 2020-07-23 8:57 AM

The Solution Booklet is now available here.

Thanks Puzzlers Club for this test.

First of all, I really like these puzzles!

Out of all the ones I solved in time, I like Starry Night especially. (Even though I basically brute forced 4 possible scenarios)

I had a hard time solving the RPS in the Instruction Booklet, so I skipped it. And then I found out it's really not that hard.

Snake pit really cost me a lot, and I didn't even solve it! That's what I get for trying to use my intuition.

I was thinking how on earth does the circle next to the 4 connects to anything, then the aha moment hits me like a truck. (I agree that the rules could be clearer, though there isn't really that much possibility for that circle. I think it's fine.)

I was stuck on Icebarn for a long time. After the contest I went back to solve them, and realized the bottom right isn't what I thought it would be.

Stostone has a very interesting rule. I like how most of the stones is forced by the large 3s in the middle.
Overall great puzzles. Thank you Puzzlers Club!

--InvalidD

P.S. Hmm... I wonder if this have something to do with this other thing you're currently running?
(Probably not. Please ignore me.)

https://youtu.be/T_5cQSWTZMw

Hi friends,
A video today covering a Yajisan Kazusan puzzle from the contest. It was a high pointer and a very tough puzzle which has almost all the tricks seen in this puzzle type.