Thanks a lot for such a nice set of puzzles...

Nice puzzles. If answer corrections are being taken, I mis-entered my solution to #6a. For the B cell I entered the shape in the region, not the shape in the cell.

Great set of challenging puzzles.
I was very bothered though by having to keep protecting the light gray lettering everywhere so I would not overlook a letter in a sequence. Slowed me down ever so slightly, and was constantly in my head. Not my favored choice of solution method.

Enjoyed the puzzles, as always -- interesting concept (fusing the puzzles). Best wishes, Dave

Edited by davep 2011-11-20 1:11 PM

'some cells (and not circles) will be blackened ' would have been much better.
I like fishermen at war and kropkuro..wonderful combi. but hey,whats common b/w akari and nansuke? Is the akari logic going to help fill in nansuke in
anyway, or viceversa? Or they are independent (that would be dull)..And i cant imagine finding quick openings in LITS square! I have same question about Majilin that i have about akari.Any help in progress?

Edited by anurag 2011-11-20 2:53 PM

Better in what sense?

better in making sense to the contestant.It was confusing.

better in making sense to the contestant.It was confusing.

Hi, thanks for this great test.
I liked the puzzles a lot, although for the first time I had problems with the solution code: I really had to search for the very hiding letters of the alphabet (in Yajilin for example my loop goes once straight over the letter so that it got invisible). And to be able to read the Kakuro-clues I had to install another printer.
Nevertheless a very good test.

Great test Tawan. Your puzzle are really enjoyable, and the idea is very elegant! Thanks for your puzzles!

Really nice test. My only problem is that I solve on computer using paint and stuff, so in the fusion ones I had to use two different tools and keep switching, which put me in a state of confusion throughout the test :P Hopefully I'll get a printer soon...

Beautiful puzzles (the kind of twisted classics I wish the WPC had).

Horrible answer entry mechanisms. I had to look back at the pdf in almost all cases where gray letters were used.

Very nice test!
Can someone send me the entire solution of Searchdoku?

I had the same problem. I thought it was only an issue with my printer, but apparently I wasn't alone.

I only managed to solve 10 puzzles (got stuck on the majilin...) but they were very good. A lot of them combined types that I'm better at with ones I can barely do at all, which was a turnoff for the test because I didn't have time to practise, but with my rate of solving I didn't even get to them.

Good test, thank you.

No more participants at this time. But the score page is not frozen yet. As many players mentioned, answer keys were problematic. So we need some extra time to revisit all wrong submissions. I expect that the complete results will be out in 3 hours from now.

Please check attachment.





Attachments
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SearchDoku.png (80KB - 3 downloads)

You've missed marking the key word BADMINTON which, without E's and not outside the grid, needs to be one of the sudoku diagonals. The all E exterior made for a very interesting puzzle; one of my favorites on this test.

Yes, I missed marking BADMINTON

Tawan has sent me the solution booklet, but this puzzle is missing there. This image is from my solving, and hence the missing line on BADMINTON.

Bit of story there. The original SearchDoku was too cumbersome and less interesting. I was discussing with Tawan to drop the puzzle from the set (the set as a whole looked very difficult to me even otherwise). But then Tawan came up with this very interesting puzzle within couple of hours, and there was no way we were excluding the new one. This one uses both the puzzles (Word Search and Sudoku) nicely. There is a clear logical path as motris shared. One of my favorites along with Anglers and Fishermen at War.

My only concern was (/is) language-neutrality of this puzzle. Just for completeness, the original puzzle used Swiss words.

Detailed results now available at - http://logicmastersindia.com/M201111P/score.asp

motris is one only player to have solved all 24 puzzles and he takes the first position. MellowMelon and xevs both have solved 22, they take the next two positions. The scores are very close after that.

243 players (a whopping 52 from the USA) participated in this test, and 194 players have got non zero scores. Thank you everyone for participating.

Thanks Tawan for an entertaining set of puzzles.

About answer key issues - The most apparent problem was the loop puzzles in Set7. With light grey letters being overwritten by the loop, many players missed couple of letters, especially I and J. As it can be seen from the score page, there are lot of manual overrides for these 3 puzzles.

I don't think the answer key itself was a problem there. We had used it rather successfully in 2010 Decathlon. The marking of the letters were the real culprit.

Phew, Puzzle Fusion is over.
Deb probably hears this after every test but I owe a huge thank to him for running Puzzle Fusion and spreading it across many forums. I was surprised by the number of participants since this was held very shortly after the exhausting WPC/WSC.

I’m happy to see that no puzzles broke, although several did just hours before the starting time. As Deb mentioned, the original Searchdoku had a Maori-named New Zealand Birds theme which made the grid rich in vowels and most placements were done on ‘feel’ than logic. I surprised myself at how better this one worked out.

About the disastrous answer keys, I really didn’t want to use length of line segments in row/column (in Japanese Puzzle Land) since this is very prone to guessers. I agree with Deb that the real culprit here is the faint lettering and how it is badly placed in the centre. Several people asked for claims in the Akari (namely the column 4 light bulb) that we really couldn’t give points for. Of course – that row was chose on purpose.

In all, this has been a great experience for myself and will be a huge step in improving my future in puzzle construction. I thank everyone who took their time in taking this test.

Thanks a lot for the puzzles, I had a lot of fun (and did quite well). There were a number of puzzles I could mention… The Majilin had a great logical solve, using both rule sets and their interactions. LITS2 is an interesting variation, the puzzle worked really well. I remember being happy I chose to do the Kakuro, a type I don't usually enjoy much. Most likely, there's an easier that better solvers would have spotted, but I found the way I broke into that Kakuro very satisfying.

The answer key problems have been mentioned. Probably, small thin black letters in the corners of cells would work a lot better.

One other thing: I felt that points per minute varied extremely between the puzzles. This is certainly in part because I'm better at some types, but I had the impression that even disregarding that, there was a large variance. What do other solvers think?

Cheers
Rob

Thanks Deb! I had illumation about the word badminton only yesterday evening before sleeping! :)

I noticed this some during the test, after thinking I'd sunk way too much time into the Kakuro/Kropki part to finish, but I did other parts much faster to get back to the right pace. Still, my last two puzzles - the Nansuke and the Akasuke felt the hardest of the whole set and took me almost 25 minutes. I'm not surprised those are the puzzles a lot of the 22/24 finished solvers had left to go.

I think this is my breakdown by section based on my answer test timing and knowing I worked some on LITS^2 before skipping and coming back:

Section 1 - 80 points - 22:52 or 3.5 points per minute
Section 2 - 55 points - 10:48 or 5.1 points per minute
Section 3 - 75 points - 25:13 or 3.0 points per minute
Section 4 - 55 points - 16:17 or 3.4 points per minute
Section 5 - 50 points - 7:10 or 6.9 points per minute
Section 6 - 55 points - 12:43 or 4.3 points per minute
Section 7 - 65 points - 11:10 or 5.8 points per minute
Section 8 - 60 points - 11:45 or 5.1 points per minute

I didn't break out specific puzzles and I'm sure the Anglers (48 seconds for 12 points per minute) and Masyu (except for answer entry, also about 1 minute) were my highest value solves but you can see the Tapa/Minesweeper was the easiest section and Akari/Nansuke was the hardest section for me with about 2.3x difference in point value. Because some puzzles rewarded intuition more than logic, having such variance is not particularly unusual although I might have changed the value of some puzzles. Only one solver did the Akasuke (uvo's wrong answer is close though), so I might venture that at least that puzzle was harder than just a 40 given the really low success rate.