Is it too late to make this test more Paint friendly? Grey or black-and-offwhite cell borders (see puzzles formatted by, for example, MellowMelon or mathgrant) make solving with a fill tool possible. Also, faint diagonal lines in the Shakashaka puzzles (see http://mathgrant.blogspot.com/2010/12/rules-proof-of-quilt.html) are helpful.

If you want to practice, nikoli.com can be a good material. There are 10 free sample puzzles for each type (Sorry, there are no Fillomino, Shakashaka and Mochikoro). For Mochikoro, there are 30 puzzles in janko.at.

Considering the results of other tests (especially Nikoli Selection), authors' intention and my test-solving time, "100 minutes" seems not too short. Some puzzles are big but will not need too much time to solve. For instance, in large Akari, ONE lightbulb illuminates 37 cells (out of 336, including itself) if there are no black cells in that row and column!

For top solvers:
There will be an announcement about partial bonus points later.

Shakashaka online at http://www.janko.at/Raetsel/Shakashaka/index.htm

Are the puzzles in the test going to be the same size as the ones in the instruction booklet? I mean the cell sizes not the dimensions of the grid. I was having a bit of trouble with them, especially with sudoku and kakuro, since with this size they are not very pencil-marks-friendly...

Other than that I am really looking forward to this test. The quality of the puzzles in the instruction booklet is superb, and we got training material too :)

Marcin

Thanks for your suggestion and sorry for the late reply. We have added very faint solid lines to some grids in Puzzle Booklet. We think you can solve with a fill tool.
As for Shakashaka, we decided to include two grids for each puzzle (Left: without diagonals, Right: with diagonals) in Puzzle Booklet. Each competitor can choose whichever he/she likes.

In most puzzles, a little bigger than Instruction Booklet. More precisely, size of cells (length of an edge) is
7mm (Sudoku, IB), 6.3mm (Kakuro, IB)
10mm (Sudoku, PB), 7.5mm (Kakuro, PB)
if printed on A4 paper.

Here is a sample page from the puzzle booklet (with Shakashaka puzzle). See image below. Click here for pdf version.

Just polished off the instructions - a tantalising appetiser to be sure. I'm definitely looking forward to the main course!

100 minutes for 23 puzzles - and at roughly 5 points per solving minute available - these timings and gradings look more than reasonable to me. Even without deu competing I'd be surprised if no-one finished the set in time!

Tom, I counted again, and there are 25 puzzles.
Your last few tests have been going neatly, and I hope you had your last counting mistake / typo in this test

Bonus points and partial bonus points

Bonus points will be computed from the time "Claim Bonus" button is clicked.
5pts/min -- solved 25 correctly
3pts/min -- solved 24 correctly and a 5-20 points puzzle is wrong
2pts/min -- solved 24 correctly and a 21-30 points puzzle is wrong
1pt/min -- solved 24 correctly and a 31-40 points puzzle is wrong.

Note : Partial bonus will be given after authors/organizers judge the wrong answer not to be dummy.

Puzzle booklet is uploaded. It has 13 pages. There is no cover page. Each page has one puzzle type.

Couple of notes :
1) After the password is displayed, the password can be selected using mouse and copied using right-click. Typing the password manually takes time and is error-prone.
2) All point claims should be made using the score page. This test has simplest of answer keys. So, we aren't sure yet if we can accept many typos.
3) While the test is running, it is best to avoid puzzle specific comments (e.g. puzzle ABC is too hard or puzzle XYZ is too easy). Please discuss them after the test.
However, feel free to leave your feedback about the test in general after you complete the test. Its everyone's feedback that most authors look forward to.

Wow is all I have to say. The quality of some of those puzzles was excellent, and I could see someone solving all of them in 100 minutes. I was able to do 14 of them, and every one I solved was good. The bottom Fillomino and Top Hitori stood out to me, but there were a lot of beautiful designs and solving paths. Thanks to the puzzle designers for such a great competition.

Edited by gpagano 2011-08-20 8:08 AM

Chinese translation available here - http://www.sudokufans.org.cn/forums/index.php?showtopic=288

Nice puzzles.Second Fillomino is the pick of them.

Edited by anurag 2011-08-20 2:02 PM

puzzles are of nice quality..
every puzzle has different ways of solving and a trick to do it.
although i could have done better..
thanks to the authors for organizing such a beautiful test.. :)

A quick note about claims : No claims will be accepted for first 7 puzzles in case of typos. There answer keys for them can not be simpler.

great test.....................awesome puzzles.......thanks to all the authors and ofcourse LMI.

Amazing test! It's pretty easy to say that this is the best competitive round of Japanese puzzles that I've seen on LMI. But I also feel like saying that this is one of the best tests we've seen as well. Thanks for the work to put this together, and I hope it can inspire my next test to be just as good.

That was an excellently put together set of puzzles. Thanks for introducing me to Mochikoro as I'd never heard of it before this test and now it's one of my favourite puzzle types. Yajilin+ is a clever variant that complements the original puzzle type nicely and I hope to see more made. Great job all.

A good set of puzzles, arigatoo gozaimashita, unfortunately I wasted too much time on big puzzles that never revealed their secrets to me... if only I was better at puzzles! :)

But at least I'm the first person to (claim to) have solved the password! Maybe that's worth some bonus points?

My compliments to the chefs!

This is not the first time I encounter problems with the answer keys for loop-based puzzles, I triple checked my yajilins and masyus and it doesn't seem to work.
Both my Masyus still turned out "incorrect" (while the puzzles were solved correctly) - I'm wondering if one-off typos can be claimed since both masyus total up to a whopping 41 points.

I definitely enjoyed this, although I must say I was frustrated somewhat with the physical printed size of the larger slitherlink and heyawake puzzles. Both were lovely puzzles but during the time I restarted and reprinted both of these several times and kept making silly errors which (aside from the usual dose of my own carelessness) I can only put down to overextending lines or dots due to the small sizes of the grid cells.

Aside from this one grievance, hats off to the authors - I much prefer puzzle tests where authors don't indulge in their own variants too much, after all the classics are classics for a reason :) Although that said, the yajilin variant here was definitely good fun!

Adding to everyone else's thanks to the authors. Unfortunately for me, I spent far to long with the Slitherlinks and made mistakes in them - wasted effort on my part.

General question: How soon after the test ends (and where) can we get the password? I rarely get the block of time to do a test, so I'm almost always just waiting for the end of the official time so I can start it.