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.

Thank you, Serkan, for amazing snakes. The last two tests here were definitely great!

Nikola

Very beautiful puzzle! Thanks!

Great puzzles. Bad typos from me. If only some method of instant grading existed....

As announced earlier, this contest will be open till Monday midnight GMT (approximately 20 hours from now)

Terrific work, Serkan! I will spend many hours on the ones I did not finish, and really enjoyed the ones I did (except maybe that one I got SO CLOSE to finishing!!).

Thank you for generously offering your time to write these puzzles for all of us to enjoy.

JZ

Thanks for the puzzles.

I would recommend consistent wording for whether or not snakes can diagonally touch. Some instructions refer to "points", others "diagonally", and others make no mention of diagonal touching.

Trayton

Great job Serkan, thank you. But I didn' find a solution for Masyu Snake. Was it possible that the snake touches itself diagonally? It wasn't specified in the PB. Otherwise I miss something. (May I have a visual solution?)

Alberto

It has a solution, probably you missed something. For Masyu Snake in the IB says that the snake cannot touch itself, so I think it is clear about diagonally touching.

Snake Variations Contest 2011 is now over. uvo won the contest, as he did last year. MellowMelon takes the second place. Nikola is other only other player to have solved all puzzles within 120 minutes.

A total of 168 players participated from 32 countries, of which 131 players got 0+ scores.

A little early for Serkan now, but I think he will soon post his views about the puzzles and the competition as a whole.

Thank you everyone for participating.

I'm not a big fan of Classic Snake puzzles (I probably have some aversion to the fact that the length is specified), but most of the puzzles in this contest uses several other logic. I especially liked the second part of the puzzles (snakes without lengths). Not a snake-puzzle-lover yet, but I think I like them more than I used to.

An unrelated note : Another test where "Claim Bonus" button had a role determining the top ranks. uvo spent close to 4 minutes before hitting Claim Bonus, MellowMelon caught his mistake before hitting the button (lucky?), motris had 2 typos which he probably could have caught if there were no Claim Bonus button.

I did not participate in the Snake Variations Contest last year. After this year's contest, I do not think I'll miss one again :-)

All the puzzles were excellent. Creating good and tricky puzzles, yet not very tough, is clearly an art, that not many possess. Serkan definitely does have it and after every test of his, there is 'satisfying' factor that I feel irrespective of my performance.

I liked Masyu and Sigma the best of the set. It never struck me that the snake could begin from one of the 'adjacent white circles' until a few minutes into solving. What really disappointed me is the Serpentine Sea Serpent. 54 pointer 64 pointer implies relatively easy in this test, but I guess I missed something. I solved it later, after the test, with a lot of erasing and tweaking, so if someone has some logic to it, please enlighten me.

Congrats to Ulrich, Palmer and Nikola. Thanks Serkan for the wonderful contest.

Edited by Rohan Rao 2011-11-29 12:58 PM

Serpentine was certainly easy, or may be I was lucky. The key was to find the two dead ends. One of the dead end was easy to find at R2C2. There are a bunch of white circles in top right corner, and I figured that one of them had to the other dead-end. Once you figure R4C9, it was all about how fast you can move your pencil.

Eh... Sorry, typo. I meant 'Sea Serpent'.

Sea Serpent: The key (at least for me) was to realize that the snake needs both R8C9 and R8C10, otherwise the 2 and 4 in column 8 can't be both satisfied. After that, look at the 7 and 8 in column 10.

Solution to Masyu Snake



Edited by debmohanty 2011-11-29 3:50 PM

Thank you Deb for the picture,
I found the correct solution this morning. A ridiculous blind point was working. :-)

Alberto