Also, in his blog, Palmer has been posting more practice materials. You may also get a tip or two regarding puzzle difficulty level as well.
Here is the link - http://mellowmelon.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/puzzle-zoo-instructions

Thanks Palmer for the practice materials and references. I'm sure it will be very helpful for players who don't frequent your blog, and also for the new variants.

??

Edited by ksun48 2011-02-16 12:00 AM

At http://logicmastersindia.com , the main page, it says Lemon's Puzzle Zoo. Is this a typo, or has MellowMelon changed to YellowLemon?

Bad typo. Fixed.

MellowMelon has been posting some very useful practice puzzles in his blog.
Today's Yajilin / Akari is super nice.

The password protected puzzle booklet is uploaded.
It has 12 puzzle pages ( 1 page per puzzle type ) + 1 cover page having points table.
The booklet has instructions and solved example for each puzzle as well.

You can now start visiting the Zoo!

Those who have completed the test can view their score at the score page

Tricky set, but fun. Especially liked the Yajilin/Akari Hybrid (even though I really don't like Akari puzzles). The Adult nonconsecutive fillomino was clever, except I couldn't get it out in time. Almost forgot to submit 2 answers while working on that one. Two silly counting mistakes again. Will get past those at one point. Let's just say those wouldn't cost me in paper competitions.
Will finish the rest some other time.

Where is the password, please? I've started, but it doesn't show me the password for the puzzle booklet.

It should appear under the start button after you have clicked start the test,.

Found the PW, thanks. I was expecting it after the first of 2 clicks required to start. Nice test!

I started the time and tried to open the PDF but it won't open, it gives me an error message

Are you getting error while opening the pdf?

Please copy the password properly. Right click on the password and Copy

I get an error when I open it before I can put a password in at all, and it doesn't even give me the usual place to put the password at all

Looks like the pdf is not downloaded properly. Sent you a PM. Please check.

Mellow Melon is da man! Great puzzles. I will be hitting myself for a long time for a typo in one answer and finishing another 60 pointer 2 seconds too late. Ugh! Great solid puzzles.
The Subro

Great puzzles, thanks!


Edited by bartunio 2011-02-27 11:20 AM

Great puzzles. I didn't do great but I had a lot of fun. One stupid mistake when extracting the answer of the Baby Fillomino - I put it down to bad handwriting. I also skipped the Adult Nurikabe after solving about half of it and then realised I had the whole B-column solved, so I wrote some semi-random numbers for column A in the last minute... no luck :D

Oh, and the Yaijilin/Akari puzzle was a great surprise. The Adult Filomino was a bit fiddly but I suppose that's why it was worth so much.

I hope to see another MellowMelon Test in the future :)

Before the start of this test I was very skeptical because I thought it would be boring test, but now I can say that I was wrong. I've never rate so many 10's. Thanks to the author and the organizers!

Nikola

The test has now ended. Full results here of course. Congratulations to Psyho (780), nyuta (710), and uvo (630) for being the top three finishers. Additional props to Psyho for being the only one to correctly solve the Akari EX Adult, although someone else was just a minor mistake away.

As the scores indicate, this test ended up being substantially harder than intended, and I am sorry for this. Here's an excerpt of a preliminary post mortem that's now been posted on my blog, which explains what went wrong from my perspective.



Any comments/advice/suggestions, whether related to the difficulty or not, are welcome. I hope you enjoyed the test, even if it was a killer.

First off, I want to say that I found the puzzles to be very enjoyable as a whole. While I haven't been a long-time visitor to your blog, I would say I have seen enough that I came in with an expectation that this was not going to be an easy test due to your construction style and my general unfamiliarity with many of the puzzle types, so perhaps that is why I was not startled to find a few puzzles that were certainly on the difficult side. Additionally, I have no qualms with a test where the top solver completes 80% of the test correctly--while I prefer finishing the test, I don't feel that it takes away from my enjoyment any if I don't, as long it's not in situations where progress is blocked by an individual puzzle (i.e. contests that depend on relaying answers from one puzzle to the next). As one of the few people that has rated the puzzles, you (presumably) can already see my opinions on most of them, but I felt that the Castle Wall Adult, Liar Slitherlink Adult, Nonconsecutive Fillomino Adult, Nurikabe/Fillomino, and Akari EX Baby puzzles were all excellent puzzles. (As a side note, I very much prefer the notation you used on the test for the Akari EX puzzles--the yellow and green text are difficult for me to differentiate in your other blog puzzles.)

While I certainly won't pretend that I speak for everyone on this, my only complaint regarding the difficulty level would be that it is very important in this test structure (with largely non-traditional types) to make sure that the Baby puzzles are easy enough to attract solvers to get through them and, if they have time, decide which Adult puzzles are most comfortable/enjoyable to focus their remaining time on. As I'm sure you've seen by now, I think the Liar Slitherlink was the biggest culprit here--I still have not found a good break-in for the Baby puzzle, and during the test I skipped the type entirely after getting nowhere with the Baby, missing out on what I found to be a more accessible (and wonderfully constructed) puzzle in the Adult version. Given that only 13 solvers submitted a solution to the Baby version, I have a feeling I'm not the only one who felt that way. As for the difficulty of the Adult versions and the hybrids, I'm a bit more lenient since they are noted as more difficult puzzles. There are three of those I still haven't completed, and while I think you'd agree based on the solving numbers the Akari EX might've been a bit over the top in difficulty, the other two (the Double Back and Double Back/Country Road hybrid) I think are just due to being a puzzle type that I'm not so great at, so I really don't have any criticism there.

While I think you'll come along to the difficulty calibration naturally, particularly if you can find a way to solicit solving times from sources you trust for some of your blog puzzles, I do have one suggestion that was touched on in your post mortem for any future online contests that you run: Answer entry needs to be consistent throughout the test, and generally as easy for the solver to determine as possible. One issue is avoiding the case of similar-looking entry mechanisms that act differently between puzzles (ex. Castle Wall/Double Back, although the LMI interface prevents this from being a serious issue due to its input checking), and the other (in my counting-challenged opinion) is avoiding mechanisms that require lots of counting, especially in situations where the puzzle grid can be cluttered. International Borders seems to be the case of this we both agree on, even though I made up my own answer key for it during the test. :) I do appreciate credit being given for both of those entries, whether it was by you or another administrator, as I did not expect it once I realized what had happened after the test.

(For the sake of full openness, neither of my other two submitted errors were due to answer entry issues--both solutions were incorrect on paper well before they made it to the LMI database.)

Overall, though, I greatly enjoyed the test, and want to be clear in my belief that it is not an effort that in any way necessitates an apology. In particular, I feel like the hybrids section offers a lot of potential to come up with some creative and fun types for the future that might make the test seem more accessible to solvers, as it is (potentially) easier to attract people to puzzles that combine the rules of two more familiar puzzle types than to learn the rules to entirely new puzzles. I've done a little messing around with constructing some similar ideas of my own privately, and if I ever can get myself into a consistent rhythm to have time to construct I'll try to share those publicly to hopefully explore that space a little bit as well. To digress from that point, though, I thought the work that went into the test was great (especially as a first effort in the contest world) and it was well worth the time spent to get myself somewhat up to speed on the puzzle types that were unfamiliar to me. Really hope to see more in the future.

Thanks willwc for a great summary from a participant's point of view. I could not agree more.
If I were to repeat, slightly easier version of the baby puzzles would have been more accessible to solvers in general since most of the puzzle types are non-traditional.

Apart from the difficulty of puzzles, all the puzzles were nicely constructed, aesthetically and logically.
Those who've not yet checked out, please have a look at the Solution Booklet at Melon's blog, which also lists some of the break-ins for each of the puzzle.

MellowMelon for this unique test. This test sounded tough when it was announced, the preview series looked tough and when the test actually turned out to be TOUGH - but it was no surprise and was quite expected. But I am sure those who wandered around in the zoo enjoyed the experience.

Instructions were long. Even after reading the instructions again and again, I was never completely in sync with all the intricacies in the instructions...and had to refer to some of them during the test as well.

My plan was to complete 7 babies in about 45 minutes, and try to get through 5 adults in 75 minutes. I did not like International Borders for some reason - so avoided it totally. But the babies did not turn out to be too docile and took me more time than expected. Probably the babies had grown up a bit after the test IB was released.

Among the ones I did solve, I liked nonconsecutive fillomino baby, the castle wall adult, and liar slitherlink "grown up" baby. Overall, all puzzles were very good and I'll have a go at the rest of them soon.