Thanks Deb, that's kind of you to say! :)

MAYnipulation is over.

Congratulations to Palmer - after coming extremely close several times earlier, he has won first time at LMI. He had a typo in a 40 pointer, but even with that the score is impressive.

Ulrich is 2nd with 710 points. Thomas is 3rd with 683 points, and I must mention that Shinichi Aoki also has 683 points though the submissions are 4 minutes late.

Not many players from India - the usual suspects take the top spots - Rohan, Amit, Rakesh in order.

Congratulations everyone and thank you for participating.

It is probably too early morning for Murat to post a comment at this time, but I think he will post soon about puzzles, and overall experience with his first(?) puzzle contest.

Great contest! Lots of beautiful and/or difficult puzzles!
I especially liked Deformable Kropki 2, Spiral Galaxies 1 and Disjointed Tapa.
I missed the "equal number" rule in 4x4 Diamonds and wasted about 10 minutes.
Moreover, I broke Clone Battle in the last few steps and could not fix it.
I should have been more careful.

Congratulations to Mellow Melon on his first victory in LMI contest!
It is becoming harder to leave my name on the hall of fame.

Thanks Deb - not very many free weekends lately, hope to start participating more frequently......

Edited by davep 2011-05-16 11:44 AM

First of all, I thank all participants, test-solvers and LMI team once again. All three together made this competition possible.
Congratulations to Palmer Mebane for his first victory, Ulrich Voigt, Thomas Snyder and Shinichi Aoki. Also, congratulations to everyone!
I'd like to share some "background" on the puzzles and my experience with the competition.

Negative Masyu: The first several drafts of the contest were almost completely loop-based puzzles, so a desire to put in Masyu was always there. I thought a different type of "rotation" would be nice. Was a little annoying to create, I ran into some problems when whites became black and broke the puzzle. I think they came out nice and easy, though.

Deformable Kropki: Being "deformable" was a feature I initially thought for Masyu. But after I created the Negatives, I thought "Kropki has blacks and whites, why not?". I started with the aim of making one of the puzzles all white, happily, it worked out.

First Seen Corral Rotator: Another duo which were a little challenging to create, I had to allow closed areas to make them work. Anyway, I'm happy with them too.

Symmetric Loop: This one is kind of a ripoff from Persistence of Memory. Another attempt to create a loop-based puzzle with just some regions as clues.

Ambigram Skyscrapers: I'm glad there wasn't much confusion with this big guy's rules. I wanted a perfect ambigram (ignore the arrows :) ) so placing outside clues according to that were a lot of work. Use 9-6 and the upper left and lower right regions to start off.

Spiral Galaxies: A classic genre, not much to say about that. In the first one, I went for a large area. I like the fact that in both the logic path to follow is never too obvious but I avoided anything that would lead to trial-error, they should be perfectly solvable logically.

The Persistence of Memory: A lovely genre in my opinion. Went simplistic with the first one. The second is easy-ish too, just a bit more work to realize how the snake must travel the regions.

Disjointed Tapa: I think placing the pieces were not that much of a problem, my aim was to make the actual solving enjoyable. I hope it worked out. Lots of choke-point action. I'm happy I managed it with 10 clues in a 10x10 grid.

4x4 Diamonds: Thought of this after creating the Superimposed Loop. Came across this variant of diamonds/minesweeper a few times and always enjoyed them. The extra rule "equal amount" is there to enhance the solving process. More tricks are available when one knows exactly how many diamonds there are in a grid. One of my personal favourites.

Superimposed Loop: A little hard on the eyes, I'm afraid. First I thought making the originals real loop puzzles (i.e. When you place all the blackened cells, then you can arrive at an unique solution) but decided against it as the given diagram would contain too many black cells. It is already enough crowded-looking. The black cell on the upper right is a good place to start dissecting.

Clone Battle: I should have made this one easier after all. The diagram/s you have to use keeps changing as you progress as do the technique. More suitable for solving when you are not stressed with a time limit, I guess. Still, rewarding to tackle I'd say. Start with UR+UL, you can eliminate C7&E7, then switch to LR+LL, you can put in three stars with certainty.


About the time limit, I guess it was a little short, as any of the high-valued puzzles may lead to being annoyingly stuck. The countdown ticking away certainly does not help with that either.
This was indeed my first time having authored a whole set. I wasn't sure how it was going to be received but now I'm encouraged, thanks for all the comments! LMI team was very helpful (patient too), the communication was smooth, I couldn't ask for more. And when it was finally competition time, it was exciting the follow the scores page. My overall experience with my first contest is a warm and fuzzy feeling. :)

One final thing, (I can't promise anything though, exams draw close!) I can create a solution steps booklet if there is demand for it. What do you think?

Once again, many thanks to everyone who made this contest a reality.
Cheers,
Murat

Edited by A Carton Mutant 2011-05-16 3:51 PM

Murat, Thanks a lot for the writeup, and more importantly providing a great set up puzzles for everyone.

It would definitely help if you can document solution steps for some least solved puzzles, especially Clone Battle

You are welcome. :) Solution steps booklet it is. Coming soon-ish! (I hope)

Murat, thanks for interesting set of puzzles. I still have some left overs to finish though :-)
I hope to see some more puzzles from you in future!

Just a question to results. I have realized that I have misunderstood the answer key for spiral galaxies. Instead of 2,1,2,1,2,1 for 5th row of the first grid I have sent 6,1,1,1 based on the requirement to enter lengths of 'different' shapes. So I have added the three parts that belong to one shape. Can you consider that as valid answer? Not that it matters much, I had fun anyway.
Thanks
Jirka

Hi jhrdina, you're welcome! I hope to return with another set someday. :)

Oh, I was afraid of that interpretation actually. It should have been "enter lengths separated by lines" or something similar for clarity. Your answer is technically correct. I'll try to get you points for that (it's just that I myself can't give points :) )

Thanks for the congratulations, and thanks again for a great test. Re deu's comment about getting on the podium: although I haven't been playing here too long, I think that's how a lot of us feel dealing with you, motris and uvo. On Twist I had felt like I had a great run upon finishing, but it wasn't enough to beat any of you. :(

For the Clone Battle, the low solving statistics may be the fact that it was at the end of the test, combined with the intimidation of four grids to consider. None of the steps were particularly tricky, although noticing them could take awhile. My memory is not precise, but I think there was one nonobvious step in the beginning involving finding two disjoint rooms in the two rightmost columns (the catch being that the rooms were in different grids) to get some X's, and everything afterwards seemed to be standard Star Battle with grid hopping. That said, it did eat up a lot of time.

Superimposed Loop is the puzzle that actually got me. I only solved it with a lucky guess - perhaps it's karma that I went on to miscount one of the grids. Ambigram Skyscrapers too, although I did get that one logically... just had to spend 20-30 minutes on it.

You should see the credits now.

Request to everyone - Please try to settle the point claims as soon as you complete the test.
Lot of manual work (e.g. LMI Ratings computation, UKPA ratings computation) is done immediately after the test is over.

Thanks guys for the points. Still at the bottom, but feeling much better now :-)) J.