Welcome to an all-new contest series on LMI, Puzzle Train. The first journey will take participants through a set of Tapa puzzles. If you are unsure what Tapa is, check out the about page for rules and explanations. The joyful ride begins on 25th December 2021 at 8:00 AM IST with the first official puzzle and then a new puzzle releasing every 30 hours. The final official puzzle will be released on 13th January 2021 at 2:00 AM IST. There will be 21 puzzles, with the first five being trial puzzles, after which the actual contest will begin, containing 16 puzzles. Some of the trial puzzles are already available for you to try. The order of puzzles is not necessarily according to difficulty. Please read the following rules carefully.
Participation:
Participants must solve within the 30-hour window of the puzzle to be considered for the official ranking of that day (i.e., the submission must be before the 30-hour window ends).
Participants can still solve the puzzle outside the official window but won't be awarded any points for that day.
The contest page will show which puzzle is active at any given moment.
Click on the "Start" button to start the puzzle. A new window will open. The puzzle page does not contain rules.
If you prefer a different display size, the participant can resize the puzzle using the “Resize” button -> Display size -> Apply Changes.
The default mode is set to "Surface" for shading, but solvers can go to "Settings" and turn OFF Penpa-lite to access other modes.
Once the solver thinks they have reached a solution, they must click the "Submit Solution" button at the bottom of the grid.
Instant grading is enabled. If the solution is correct, a pop-up will appear saying so, and the player can rate the puzzle and provide any feedback, which will appear on the discussions page. Next, there will be a link to go back to the contest page.
A penalty of "2" minutes is added to solving time for each wrong submission.
Features:
Once the participant has successfully solved the puzzle, the following will be available on the contest page:
Ratings – Participants can rate each puzzle.
Discussion – Participants can share comments or discuss the puzzle on the "Standings/Feedback" page. Each puzzle has its own discussion page.
Replays – Participants can check out other players' solution approaches by clicking on "Standings" and then clicking on individual times.
We will have two separate leaderboards. One would be considering the puzzle points and daily standings based on time. The other would be for early bird submissions, a similar concept to the time trials recently conducted as part of the World Puzzle Convention.
Main Leaderboard:
A – Top 100 players get points from 100 to 1 based on their ranking for that day. If there is a tie in the time, then both the players get the same points (i.e., let’s say there is a tie for 5th place, the tied players all get 96 points)
B – Puzzle Points – This will remain unknown until the end of the contest.
Live contest results will be used to calculate these points.
A total pool of 1600 points for 16 puzzles is reserved.
At the end of the contest, the Average time for each puzzle using top 10 solvers’ times will be calculated.
Based on these times, each puzzle will be allocated appropriate points
Final Ranking – Cumulative of A + B for each day.
Early bird Leaderboard:
There are 16 puzzles, with each puzzle dropping live every 30 hours.
The choice of 30 hours allows a fair share of puzzles at convenient and not-so-convenient times.
The starting time for each separate puzzle will be the same for all the contestants.
C - Top 100 players get points from 100 to 1 based on their ranking for that day. If there is a tie in the time, then both the players get the same points (i.e., let’s say there is a tie for 5th place, the tied players all get 96 points)
Scoreboards will reset after 1st official puzzle starts.
Scoring - Puzzle points (B value) may or may not change as the contest progresses. Final value of each puzzle will be determined after last puzzle ends.
You may notice several changes/improvements on the contest page. Thank you to everyone for their inputs and feedbacks.
I would highly encourage everyone to rate the puzzle and provide your feedback. However, we have now added the "SKIP" option to Ratings if you do not choose to.
We have added an emoji feature to the discussion area.
This forum thread is now restricted. If you have any issues with any puzzles, please feel free to post here. We will try to address it at our earliest.
In case of any conflict, the organizers' decision will be final.
Thank you everyone for their participation and making this contest a successfull run. It was first of its kind and many more to come. Thanks for all the feedback and you may have noticed that we constantly kept improving the overall interface. Congratulations to the winners.
Overall - Official
Endo Ken
Freddie Hand
Prasanna Seshadri
Overall - Early Bird
Christian Konig
hatice esra aydemir
Kartal Nagy
India - Official
Prasanna Seshadri
Kishore Kumar
Nikhil Khetan
India - Early Bird
Prasanna Seshadri
Anubhav Balodhi
Harsh Poddar
There are some fascinating stats to observe. You can checkout full details here but I will highlight few:
Every puzzle was rated by at least 100 players and all puzzles had a rating 4+. There were also a total of 400+ comments. I am glad you all liked the puzzles and provided feedback.
A total of 0.9M+ clicks got captured. I am pretty sure it crossed 1M because there were a couple of bugs we found which I will mention in the next post
400+ participants (including trials). Thanks everyone for participating.
Continue reading to the next post if you want to learn about the planning and thoughts for the contest.
It all started in Nov 2020. I wanted to revive the traditional Classic Tapa Contest that was held in the past on the Logic Masters India (LMI) and the one that I enjoyed a lot. In that regard, I started creating the puzzles and almost created around 30 Tapa's of various sizes. Unfortunately, it was the same time when browsers no longer supported Adobe FLASH. The classic tapa contest interface was using FLASH and hence no longer working. The puzzles I built were lying in the dust, and I had to patiently wait until we figured out some alternative solution for it. Fortunately, in 2021 I took Penpa+ development a bit more seriously and dedicated a lot of my time. This gave us the idea to utilize the Interface to introduce again/enable online solving on the LMI website. Thanks to Deb for his remarkable effort and time to integrate Penpa+ into the LMI server. You may have noticed constant improvements and developments. Initially, we started with contests by providing Penpa solvable links and then integrated them fully into LMI. With an online solving set up for the regular contests, it was time to think about the classic tapa contest and bring it to life. After many discussions between Deb, Prasanna, and myself, we came up with a Daily Puzzle Series Idea that will incorporate different puzzle genre runs. Finally, in November, the development towards this goal started, and we were ready to launch during Christmas. Also thanks to Deb for testing all the puzzles and providing great feedback. I will now share the thoughts behind the contest structure and content.
Tapa Train thoughts/highlights:
Scoring: We wanted to try something new and also wanted to keep it simple. I think we achieved that goal here. Having different winners for overall and Earlybird indicates that the idea of having two separate leaderboards was a success. We had four players (CJK, aras, kartal and Natty841) that solved all the 16 puzzles within the 1st hour of release. I appreciate your dedication.
Puzzle Release Time: Since we decided to have an Earlybird concept, it was important to provide a fair opportunity to most participants. That is why we selected a 30-hour time gap between each release, which allocated four different start times during the day throughout the series. Hence the choice of 4*4 = 16 Tapa Puzzles. From the statistics, 14:30 GMT was the most preferred time as that is when the fastest 100 players started the puzzle.
Grid Size:I wanted to have a wide range of grid sizes, and you can see that from 7x7 to 20x20. Secondly, I wanted to have some easy puzzles for the participants who got delayed onboarding the Tapa Train. For that, I split the puzzles from small to big into two weeks. This also worked in many other aspects of a relaxing, confidence booster to start another week of puzzles from easy after the challenging 15x15 and 17x17.
Ratings/Discussion:We wanted to have this feature before we launched the contest as this would be a great way to get the feedback and also allow solvers to discuss their thoughts. Hopefully, we made it easier for everyone by immediate prompt after successfully submitting the puzzle. Thank everyone again for taking the time to rate the puzzle and provide feedback. However, I hope solvers share more in-depth thoughts about their experience along with emojis in future contests.
Replay:This was definitely a must feature for us. I suddenly got an idea of how we can achieve that, and I am glad it worked out. I hope everyone liked this feature and used it to learn from each other. I, for one, watched a lot of replays, and it's fun to see how different solvers approach the same puzzle.
Improvements: With all that said, there are some areas of improvement
Scoring: We will discuss to see if any minor changes or improvements can be made in terms of penalty
Replay: For some reason, the maximum number of clicks was getting capped at 1001, and I am not sure why. I need to do further investigation and hopefully fix it before the next contest. Also someone using delete all to clear the puzzle, would also clear the click count. I will try to improve this as well.
Penpa Interface : I will try to disable the access to outside border cells to enhance the solving experience further.
About Page: Explanation of rules using images helped a lot of new puzzlers. However, I could have included some practice puzzle links or youtube videos with Tapa Solving tips. Perhaps we can add a section called "Resources" on the About page if applicable in future contests.
Sorry for such a long post, but I needed to share these thoughts, so everyone knows how much thought and effort went into setting up this framework. Hopefully, this would be the beginning of many future daily puzzle series. I, for one, know that we already have three more series lined up by other authors...
Final thoughts:
If you are interested in hosting such contest, please reach out to Prasanna Seshadri and we can dicuss about the genre and potential dates.
All the replays are unlocked.
Restricted Thread is now removed and anyone can post and see their thoughts in this forum.
If you have any feedback/ideas, things you liked, things that can be improved, please feel free to share here on the forum, and we will try to address it within our capability.
All the puzzles are logically solvable. If you need any help finding the next step in any puzzle, please post here.
I plan to make solving videos for a few top-rated puzzles, but if you want me to cover any particular puzzle, let me know. I will be covering 17x17 and 20x20 for sure.
I've voiced my thoughts in a couple of other places, and think that the scoring method is the biggest flaw. I'll go into a bit more shortly, but I want to highlight the things I really liked about this series. Having replays, even if I didn't watch many, is a phenomenal addition that I'd love to see expanded- perhaps the solver could annotate certain moves or the actual times of inputs could also be logged to see where thinking times were? The puzzles themselves were generally very nice across the board showing a lot of variety in the genre, though I think there could have been another easy puzzle and another hard puzzle- there were a lot of middle difficulty ones (and to keep 16, two of these could have been saved for elsewhere). The comments area probably didn't need emoji as it made most of the comments a single emoji- dividing this into "reacts" and "comments" may work better for actually capturing comments? The system being in place is a huge plus though, and most of these are minor opinion based things. As an aside, I would definitely appreciate if there were 2 puzzles open at once instead of just 1, giving a longer period- even for 1 puzzle it's not always easy to fit it in.
What I think is less of an opinion is the scoring system. I do not like going purely by placement but acknowledge it's the simplest way to aggregate results with different amounts of finishers. Expanding the scoring to more solvers, or perhaps having 51st and 52nd get 50 points, 53rd and 54th 49 and so on (or a similar adjustment) may help include more solvers who may have finished near the bottom on most solves. For a first run, top 100 makes sense as I expect the volume of people participating far exceeded what was expected- a great problem to be having!
Even more egregious though is inconsistent penalties. A flat rate just doesn't work with this format, as 2 minutes on smaller or shorter puzzles could easily be 100 placements, while on the larger ones a penalty cost maybe a dozen placements or less. This ends up putting a much greater weight on the smaller and easier puzzles, which is backwards from what's typical. I firmly believe that going forwards, penalties should be based on either a percentage of your own time being added to it (perhaps plus a small flat amount to discourage guessing further) or based on the performance of others- as an arbitrary example, 25% of the 25th fastest error free time on a puzzle.
Scoring is, of course, only relevant to the competitive aspects. The community aspects, the general format, the technical side of getting this to work and the puzzles themselves are all on point already I think. Looking forward to the future of these for sure.
Great contest with great puzzles! I can't say much about the scoring system since I didn't thought about it since it was pretty clear that I will probably never get any points.
Just two small remarks:
1.) Forcing feedback is always bad in my opinion. Especially in the exact moment after you finished the puzzle and want to see the results you get forced to press some emoji or whatever. You can bypass it, but for me it still feels annoying and the quality of feedback you get that way is questionable at best.
2.) The star system for quality feedback is also not good in my opinion, since a lot of popular sites use a 1-5 stars rating for difficulty (e.g. GMpuzzles and the LMG portal).
That was a great contest with beautiful Tapas! Thank you!
And the contest was very well doable just with the mobile phone, even the 20x20 puzzle.
In future it would be great, if there is more time to solve the puzzles, i.e. every 30h a new puzzle but the puzzle counts during the next 5 days, since not everybody has time to solve them on a daily basis.
As IHNN already mentioned, the scoring A for 1-100 rank is in my opinion suboptimal, because, luckily, of the high number of participants. It would motivate more if each participant get some points and not only the best solvers.
The replay button is a great feature to learn from the top solvers or just to see the different approaches.
I‘m looking forward for the next puzzle types :)!
I've voiced my thoughts in a couple of other places, and think that the scoring method is the biggest flaw. I'll go into a bit more shortly, but I want to highlight the things I really liked about this series. Having replays, even if I didn't watch many, is a phenomenal addition that I'd love to see expanded- perhaps the solver could annotate certain moves or the actual times of inputs could also be logged to see where thinking times were? The puzzles themselves were generally very nice across the board showing a lot of variety in the genre, though I think there could have been another easy puzzle and another hard puzzle- there were a lot of middle difficulty ones (and to keep 16, two of these could have been saved for elsewhere). The comments area probably didn't need emoji as it made most of the comments a single emoji- dividing this into "reacts" and "comments" may work better for actually capturing comments? The system being in place is a huge plus though, and most of these are minor opinion based things. As an aside, I would definitely appreciate if there were 2 puzzles open at once instead of just 1, giving a longer period- even for 1 puzzle it's not always easy to fit it in.
What I think is less of an opinion is the scoring system. I do not like going purely by placement but acknowledge it's the simplest way to aggregate results with different amounts of finishers. Expanding the scoring to more solvers, or perhaps having 51st and 52nd get 50 points, 53rd and 54th 49 and so on (or a similar adjustment) may help include more solvers who may have finished near the bottom on most solves. For a first run, top 100 makes sense as I expect the volume of people participating far exceeded what was expected- a great problem to be having!
Even more egregious though is inconsistent penalties. A flat rate just doesn't work with this format, as 2 minutes on smaller or shorter puzzles could easily be 100 placements, while on the larger ones a penalty cost maybe a dozen placements or less. This ends up putting a much greater weight on the smaller and easier puzzles, which is backwards from what's typical. I firmly believe that going forwards, penalties should be based on either a percentage of your own time being added to it (perhaps plus a small flat amount to discourage guessing further) or based on the performance of others- as an arbitrary example, 25% of the 25th fastest error free time on a puzzle.
Scoring is, of course, only relevant to the competitive aspects. The community aspects, the general format, the technical side of getting this to work and the puzzles themselves are all on point already I think. Looking forward to the future of these for sure.
Thank you for your detailed thoughts.
Some general responses here.
- The scoring system will not change as of now because we value the simplicity of it where anyone can simply look at it and understand what's going on immediately. This helps the casual solvers as well to have a good idea of where they place and why, and on balance we want to prioritize that. Having 51st and 52nd get 50 and so on seems interesting though. We will definitely think about that.
- We are definitely going to improve the penalty system. We will be implementing something similar to the Instant Grading in other LMI contests, but with increments in percentage of time increased per wrong submission. We will release more details when the next series is promoted here.
- We are looking at ways to categorize the feedback better in general.
Great contest with great puzzles! I can't say much about the scoring system since I didn't thought about it since it was pretty clear that I will probably never get any points.
Just two small remarks:
1.) Forcing feedback is always bad in my opinion. Especially in the exact moment after you finished the puzzle and want to see the results you get forced to press some emoji or whatever. You can bypass it, but for me it still feels annoying and the quality of feedback you get that way is questionable at best.
2.) The star system for quality feedback is also not good in my opinion, since a lot of popular sites use a 1-5 stars rating for difficulty (e.g. GMpuzzles and the LMG portal).
Oh and I'd love to see replay in real-time added.
Thank you for your kind words and feedback.
Regarding forcing feedback, as you said it can be bypassed pretty easily. We think from the perspective of authors that it is worth keeping it this way, even if the quality isn't the best, because people providing their puzzles freely generally like to see feedback and a possibility to engage with the solvers. We would rather appeal to solvers to use the feedback system productively with this in mind. This stance can change if more people feel the feedback system needs changes.
We will be changing the star system to make things clearer.
We are discussing/looking into the possibility and implementation of real-time replays.
ropeko - 2022-01-16 6:18 PMThat was a great contest with beautiful Tapas! Thank you!And the contest was very well doable just with the mobile phone, even the 20x20 puzzle.In future it would be great, if there is more time to solve the puzzles, i.e. every 30h a new puzzle but the puzzle counts during the next 5 days, since not everybody has time to solve them on a daily basis.As IHNN already mentioned, the scoring A for 1-100 rank is in my opinion suboptimal, because, luckily, of the high number of participants. It would motivate more if each participant get some points and not only the best solvers.The replay button is a great feature to learn from the top solvers or just to see the different approaches.I‘m looking forward for the next puzzle types :)!
Thank you for your feedback. I am glad you enjoyed the ride.
-- We already have regular contests which last for 5 days or a week and we wanted a different flavor of the contest with this. Said that we will consider this suggestion and have an internal discussion if any changes are needed.
-- Each participant does get some points, that is what B is for. B is the puzzle points on solving the puzzle successfully and is not dependent on your ranking. Do note that your total points is equal to A+B.
I know the contest is long over, but I am getting "Wrong solution" for several of my correct solutions. It seems this happens whenever I submit a wrong solution first - all subsequent submissions are then deemed wrong. This is still the case even if restarting from scratch ("delete all").
I know the contest is long over, but I am getting "Wrong solution" for several of my correct solutions. It seems this happens whenever I submit a wrong solution first - all subsequent submissions are then deemed wrong. This is still the case even if restarting from scratch ("delete all").
We are still trying to debug this issue and have not found anything missing at our end.
Lets take one specific puzzle for example : Tapa 13
Can you submit the puzzle again and after you get the "Wrong Solution" message, can you please share a screenshot of your solved grid?
Tapa Train - 25th Dec to 14th JanReply33 posts • Page 1 of 2 • 12
@ 2021-12-23 11:34 AM (#30189 - in reply to #30188) (#30189)Quote Reply Top
