Nice group of puzzles, more, more!!

I Find the answer key for hashi and lits very simple indeed....can't be simpler...

by the way in shikaku I entered the column next (right) to the column A I know its stupid but I keep doing it.... any chances to have the points awarded?

stefano

All claims made in forum or made using the Score page will be settled. Please allow us few hours.

puzzles were excellent .
I njoyed a lot.
although could have done better.
would be waiting for nikoli 3..!!

Thanks for the puzzles, great test!

If you can reconstruct all my answer entries then you will see that my latest entry was just overwriting one valid entry key (that I entered much earlier) by another. This could save me some seconds for the tiebreaker and one rank in the final table. :-)

Have fun,
Stefan

P.S.: I actually had a reason to overwrite my solution a second time. You can write me an email if you want to have an explanation. Here it would be a spoiler.

@euklid, please see my PM

The answer key for Hashi is simple, I agree. But I'm not convinced its the simplest. The problem is there's a good chance of a counting error. It requires the player to go through the entire grid carefully. And one can easily mistake a double bridge by a single one in counting (especially those with cumbersome handwriting).
There are some interesting suggestions in the answer key topic for Hashi.

I had to change computers part of the way through since mine lost its internet connection. The results page only shows those I entered on the second computer - can you add in those I submitted previously please? Thanks! :)

Yet another enjoyable test... unfortunately my printer ink died (thanks hubby for printing so many things and not telling me) so I had to transcribe most of the puzzles which slowed me down even further than my usual glacial pace.

Great test. Typo correction request for the Hashi: the solution I entered is the total number of horizontal bridges (so 2 * double horizontal bridges + 1 * single horizontal bridges).

Nice puzzles(whatever i attempted) !
Made few really stupid errors while submitting the answers(Maybe im too sleepy at this hour!)
(Please consider them if possible!)
Errors:
1.Shikaku-submitted the column to the right of B arrow.
2.Numberlink-submitted the combination of R2 and R3(i dunno what was i looking at!)
Overall i had a good time solving !
All the best to all the remaining participants !

Very nice puzzles and a lot of fun solves to be found. Thanks Tom!

Unfortunately updated submission form (since IIRC June's sudoku test) does not work for me on Linux (Firefox with Adobe flash player, Chromium with internal flash player).... after login in I get only text "Connecting to server to get status" and nothing else happens; I can't press Start.

Edited by mtronic 2011-07-10 10:00 PM

Really sorry to hear that. It will be too difficult to fix it in short notice.
Please see my message.

I would like to work with you sometime next week to fix the issue since I don't have access to Linux machine.

Thanks for your prompt support.... looks like I've found the issue within the Flash player settings, there wasn't local storage allowed for LMI site. Now the applet shows timings and it looks I'll be able to use it for the test.

I expect, that this same might happen on Windows as well, so even other users might come across this issue if they have disabled or too small storage size setting.

Just like to add my thanks to Tom and all at LMI for this. Very enjoyable - too many silly mistakes as per usual from myself at the time.

Just as a comment - I have a laserjet printer that once it's printing is fine and fairly quick. It seems to take ages formatting some documents before it decides to print them. With this particular contest I had to wait for it to prepare the document prior to print, then it just printed the first page then sat waiting to prepare the next. Unfortunately, because the first page had the list of puzzles I was unable to start solving then and had to wait for the second page. This took 3 minutes in total. If possible, can contest authors inform us whether the first page of the puzzle booklet will have puzzles on or not? - At least then I may be able to set it up for reverse order print. Thanks

You'll find that the site admins have been doing exactly this for awhile, by posting booklet information in the forum when they upload it. Perhaps the info can be on the test page itself, but this was available:

Liane - Next time it could help if you first print ONLY page 1 (if significant) or ONLY page 2 (or any other page you like), then you print the entire document - so the pc/printer will not format the entire document before starting printing.

Thanks Motris. I'd missed the information about the cover sheet - carelessness on my part. I'll be more careful to check next time.
Thanks Stefano for your idea. I'll certainly try that. It's sounds a much better option for me.

Very nice puzzle set. My favorite had to be the Shikaku. Thanks Tom!

With no more participants at this time, Nikoli Selection 2011 is over.

We'll take few more hours to review some of the wrong submissions, but the positions in top 10 will not change.

Congratulation to Hideaki Jo (all 19 puzzles), Thomas Snyder (18 puzzles), NAGATA Yuta (17 puzzles) for topping this test.

Indian results are not very encouraging, Rohan, Amit and Rajesh take top 3 spots.

Total 215 players participated, out of which 168 got non zero scores. This is easily the most that participated in any LMI 2011 puzzle test.

Detailed score with submission timings now available - as usual - at http://logicmastersindia.com/M201107P1/score.asp

Mind boggling performance from Hideaki Jo - he finished 3 marathons in about 42 minutes.
Apart from Thomas, volxa also finished 2 marathons, but with 2 mistakes.

Lot of players finished all Main section puzzles, and many more getting close to finishing them.

Thank you everyone for participating, and making this successful.

Thanks Tom for providing a very entertaining puzzle set, I'm sure everyone had some favourites among them. My personal favourites are LITS, SHIKAKU, NURIKABE and AKARI.

It was not surprising to see that 5 out of top 8 players are from Japan (just like last time). Of course, some players from German were missing, may be because of German Puzzle Championship on Saturday.

Yes, makes sense to put that information in the submission page itself. Will do that for future tests.

One funny quirk I'd like to point on the Kakuro: on the solving route I took, I had most of the lower-left to upper-right diagonal after a short amount of work, basically dividing the rest of the puzzle into two halves with only one blank cell in common. I noticed that the answer entry only looked at the upper half, so I applied the usual "row sums minus column sums" logic to get that blank cell and finished with basically half of the puzzle unsolved. In general I think one should avoid marking rows/columns on the edge of the puzzle if at all possible, since otherwise you're prone to allowing this kind of thing.

MellowMelon: I was fairly confident the solving route had to go something like bottom left -> bottom right (via some work on the lower diagonal) -> top right -> bottom left (via the other diagonal) and then finally end up in the top left. Nothing like this was mentioned in the test solving, although I am always a little wary about concentrating solution keys in one area. There were a couple of other puzzles as well where I thought something like that could plausibly happen, but again I don't think this affected many solvers. It's definitely something I'll think about more in the future.

Thanks all for taking part and for generally leaving such kind comments. I'm very glad that this contest went through without any hitches like last time, and really impressed with some of the scores. Motris actually had the main 16 out faster than deu (and indeed faster than I had managed to test solve my own damn puzzles!), but as I raised the point earlier on in the thread, if player X gets more of the marathons out than player Y then X is indeed the worthy winner in my eyes. I had thought it'd be impossible to get all 3 marathons out and was truly astonished to see that deu had managed it.

I hope there weren't too many people who were in the situation of finishing the main set but unable to get 1 marathon out - actually I think all things considered even getting the main 16 out entails a seriously good performance. Of course, the vast majority of solvers *didn't* finish the set, so I hope there was something in this test for everyone, and that you enjoy the remaining puzzles without any extra competitive stress.

Finally, thanks again to Deb for running the show seemingly effortlessly, and to Rakesh and David for testing.