With no one participating in Crazy Arrows now, the test is over. 3 players managed to solve more than 9 Sudokus and they take the podium - motris (11), Nikola(10), Kota(10). Congratulations to them and thank you everyone for participating.

Indian results : Rakesh, Amit and Jaipal take the top 3 spots.
Overall 184 players participated, and 134 got non-zero scores.

A tough test indeed with so many zero scores and many players not submitting anything towards the end. Although there were many easy puzzles, I thought SYMMETRIC was highly undervalued, thus trapping many solvers. It was only 75 points, but is solved by only 10 players. Having correct points for that puzzle would have been a huge step forward for a perfect test.

I can't comment on this test since I didn't finish, but on the last few tests I've caught that this button is not "active" until you have enough correctly formatted answers in the system. In other words, while it is there to click on, it cannot end your test until you could possible have a bonus to have. It also has a "are you sure" dialog afterwards which always costs me another minute of bonus as I keep forgetting it exists and losing 3 seconds to go over a quanta of minute.

I didn't post any comments during the test for a few reasons - first I was rushing off to help run a puzzle event and didn't have time and also I had some mixed feelings because the puzzles were great in places and hard in places and it really paid to switch to new puzzles. Some of it may be that puzzles like Symmetric Arrow were simply unfamiliar, but I also felt a puzzle like that had a lot of necessary steps at least under time pressure that felt more like guesses than deductions. So I put Symmetric quickly on my do not do pile until after I ran out of time. I ended up getting back to Sum 1 and Missing Arrow (worth more) before running out of time on Symmetric. Outside of those three puzzles, I think I really liked everything on the test. Thanks Rohan for a really creative set of arrow variations. I'm sure I'll be playing with some of these again in the future.

1) In a puzzle test, we deactivate the button until all puzzles are "filled in". But in Sudoku test, we don't do that because players could be solving/submitting online. ( Of course, this test didn't have online mode, but ...)
In Sudoku test, it remains enabled all the time, and it works like "Submit". Once all your sudokus are submitted (either paper mode or online mode), it pops up the "Are you sure" dialog.
If you have entered only half of the sudokus, and you click on "Claim Bonus", the sudokus will be submitted, and nothing else will happen. So it is close to the "Submit" button, but not dangerous.


2) After you finish typing all puzzles/sudokus, you can directly click on "Claim Bonus". As I've noted in some earlier thread, "Claim Bonus" button also submits all puzzles. So, if you are anyway planning to claim bonus immediately after submitting, you may directly click on "Claim Bonus".

I think the "are you sure" dialog is necessary to avert any unwanted claims (especially that submission is not allowed after that). It is easy to remove the dialog box if players don't think it is any useful.

Don't get me wrong, I like the concept of the "are you sure" box preventing mistaken clicks. And it is very good as you describe that the actual functionality is just "submit" not "end test" as Stefano was worried. This system seems ideal to get the correct functionality for all solvers. The exact functionality has not been described though until this response so now we can remove the potential stress some solvers might get from it.

And my nitpicky-ness is probably due to having played the typical WPC game of clock watching to "stop checking the last puzzle before the next minute" on the last two tests and gotten small point drops. My last submission was exactly on the minute I think for JPL and ST (95:00 and 41:00 I think) which is when I hit submit and claim. I should obviously have given myself 3 more seconds each time, as I just rolled over to the next minute with the second click in the other window.

Edited by motris 2011-09-12 6:49 AM

I misunderstood and thought you wanted to remove the "are you sure" dialog.

Yes, I agree that some of these features are not documented anywhere. We need a FAQ kinda thingy for the tests. With LMI attracting new players every week, players are unlikely to browse through old posts to know how certain things behave. With (at least) 3 weeks gap between now and next LMI test, we'll try to make a FAQ.

Given that I felt like all 9 of the puzzles I solved were at a fairly sluggish pace (possible exception of sum 1, but even that had a wrong guess) and yet I still got that rank, this was evidently a very tough set. I personally enjoyed Count, Sum 2, and Product the most. My solve of Parted was rife with bifurcations, so I'll have to go back and see if I missed something. I didn't even touch Symmetric because the example in the IB destroyed me; there's too many ways to draw those arrows...

Thanks Stefano, Thomas and Palmer.

Firstly, congrats to the top three, Thomas, Nikola and Kota and thanks to all participants. I hope you enjoyed.
This was certainly a tough set. I thought Missing was the toughest and required some guesswork and luck.

I apologize for Symmetric. It was worth 75 points and that was clearly misleading. We missed something during testing. When I saw very few people solving Symmetric, we checked the puzzle again and thats when we found out it was much tougher than earlier thought. This is completely my lack of completion and Symmetric was worth much more (probably more than 120), only I am at fault.

Regarding the other sudokus, most of the players liked Sum2 the best. My favourite three were Sum2, Wrong and Product.

I'm glad I could conduct this event since I got the idea of Crazy Arrows over a year back.
Hope to see you in 'Crazier Arrows' :-)

Edited by Rohan Rao 2011-09-12 11:13 AM

Rohan, there were some exceptional puzzles in here and you deserve many congratulations for putting together such a clever set! Rarely does a sudoku really get the mind working so hard for so long, and for the designs to be so nifty is a nice touch as well. Thank you for the set.

Having said this, I found the Missing Arrow EXTREMELY difficult/impossible/guess-y (as did nearly everyone else) and the Parted Arrow felt similar to me (although 25 people solved it so I must have missed something, as usual). Until today, I had never ever torn up the page in a fit of absolute rage upon finding an error, so that must mean something! :) It is uncommon for a LMI sudoku test to have what feels like many necessary bifurcation steps, and in that sense I guess I am surprised. Of course it's very possible I just don't see the logic-based steps...

I will say that both Sum puzzles were terrific. The first one had a neat killer feel to it, and I felt that a necessary step was one I had never seen before in an Arrow puzzle. The second one had such a clean path to its solution that it will be remembered. A pity I spent 30-some minutes hitting my head against the desk on the three puzzles that stumped me midway through the test, else I might've gotten some points on #2!

i wish i had not attempted the symmetric arrow which ate up my valuable 25 minutes in which i could have solved atleast 2 more . but the puzzles were really good. thanks a lot rohan for such nice set of sudokus.

Missing Arrow was tough and guesswork was obligatory. An interesting fact: Missing Arrow Sudoku is the least solved individual sudoku in any LMI sudoku test so far. So, kudos to Hideaki, Minfang, Murat, Thomas and Zafer.


I had created 5 Arrow Sums Sudokus for this test and I had to include two of them. I think I chose wisely :-)

Thanks a lot, and I'm glad you enjoyed.

Thats unfortunate, I'm sorry. Thanks :-)

Beautiful puzzles Rohan. All of them were gems. Congratulations!
I look forward to equally crazy arrows, not crazier, please!

Thanks Harmeet.

Thanks for the fun tournament ! Very nice variations. Missing arrow and parted arrow made me completely crazy ! I lost a lot of time on these both grids and at the end I had some mistakes...
I've to solve these grids again and the symetric, which I have not yet began. Others were very beautiful and nice grids.

Fred

Thanks Fred.