I look forward to the contest. I have a few questions:

In Graffiti Snake the rules saying "without touching itself", but in the example there is a diagonally contact at one point. Is it allowed?
And maybe two stupid questions. In Easy As Snake it's not written that head and tall are given by circles, but it should be. Am I right? And in Serpentine there is no letters in the left grid, I hope this is just a omission and that we will see it in the regular puzzle.

Nikola

:) You are right i missed the touching. I will fix the example. Yes snake cannot touch even diagonally.

Yes these two circles are head and tail, and i think i should mention in the instruction.

I marked only solutions in every puzzles to avoid making confusion. So of course all puzzles have arrows and the puzzle has letters.

Is there any option to specify whether a user need the extra 10 minutes. Example if a user solves five or six puzzles in the given 120 minutes, the user won't wish to lose 120 points for just 10 extra minutes where he is not sure whether he ll be able to finish any extra puzzle.

This seems such an obvious loophole so I'm sure you must have a check for that ..............................


Deb edited this post and added : This has got nothing to do with Snake Variation Contest

Edited by debmohanty 2011-11-23 9:46 AM

Is there any chance there can be an optimalisation used like they have on logic masters deutschland for late submissions? That way you always get your maximum score and don't have to worry about calculating how many points you lost by submitting late and then comparing it to the score of the puzzle. Because in the calculating of that you might lose another 12 points while verifying if it's worth submitting or not.

I don't exactly understand what your point is. Everyone is free to use or not to use the Extra time. After you start the test, your timer will be as shown in the attachment.

It is completely upto you to determine if you should be using the Extra time.

I can see two usages of the extra time.
1) If you check Janoslaw's submissions in Fusion test, it looks like he was engrossed in solving, almost forgot to submit. But when he started submitting, he didn't have enough time to submit all. Having extra time would have enabled him to submit all his solved ones with a minor penalty
2) If your 120 minutes is up, but you are may be 1 or 2 minutes away from finishing a puzzle, you should continue solving and submit asap. This works like a tie breaker in this case.

Since the point value per minute is around 10 and penalty is around 12, one probably won't gain much if they start solving a fresh puzzle after 120 minutes.





Attachments
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2011-11-23 09 38 23.png (1KB - 4 downloads)

Agree with that. The LMD optimisation system is good. It's always a bit frustating when you submit after the time, and you notice that you lose points because of that.

Fred

I like the idea of extra time. But I think the 10 minutes is too much time.
If the aim of this system is what you wrote 5 minutes is more than enough.

About Extra time
===========

For this contest, we will make few minor changes to extra time concept.
1) Penalty will be .2 points per second
2) In the submission page, you can see the amount of penalty when 'Extra Time' is running. This will help you determine easily if you should submit any puzzle or not. See attachment.







Attachments
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2011-11-24 20 19 56.png (8KB - 3 downloads)

Password protected puzzle booklet added. It has 13 pages, including a cover page. As noted earlier, example grids are not present in the puzzle booklet.

Link to score page - http://logicmastersindia.com/SVC2011/score.asp
Note that the score page can be viewed only after the Extra time is over.

Is there still going to be a claim bonus button? Not that I expect it will apply to me, but as I saw it said score won't be available till Extra time is over.

If you claim bonus, you can see the scores instantaneously. For claiming bonus, it is required to submit all puzzles.

Does this test affect your ratings?

No, this is already answered in "About Annual Competitions" thread.

Yet another quick note about Penalty points
The time of your submission will be the time the server received your answer, not the time you clicked on submit button. In most cases the difference will be couple of seconds.

Great puzzles. Thanks to the organizers and Author for this great test.

If length of a segment is more than 10, how to write the answer?

We'll accept answers with unit digit, if that is what you are asking about.

Serkan: I think you forgot to write this in the answer key. Thanks for a fun and challenging test.

:) No, actually I didn't forget. This issue is a specific condition, so I didn't want to consider a general case in this contest, so I ignored that. Because we can easily give points to both answer formats, not a big deal. Main idea in my mind is that don't make confusion for competitors with more details in answer format

Thanks

Beautiful puzzles. I did terribly but liked the puzzles a lot, especially the snake egg puzzle.

Edited by mucha 2011-11-26 11:14 PM

To get bonus points all puzzles must be solved, so if a competitor solve 15 + half of Spiral Snake puzzle he/she cannot get bonus points, he should solve whole Spiral Snake puzzle.

Edited by yureklis 2011-11-27 4:58 AM

Thanks for the excellent Snake puzzles, and hoping my one bit of stupidity can be forgiven. I particularly enjoyed Graffiti and Sigma.