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

Really enjoyed the test. I used to think I'm horrible at snake, and leave it whenever it appeared in competitions. Not gonna do that from now, found these solvable and fun and got quite a morale boost. :)

Hi,

You were very kind about my puzzles, thank you very much.

Last year I wanted to organise a Snake puzzle competition. I don’t know why, or I don’t remember exact reason in my mind, I asked some puzzlers from LM Deutschland, and Jörg Reitze agreed to help me about holding Snake competition under LMD. Because there are some rules, that only LMD members can hold a competition under LMD title. By the help of Jörg I had a chance to show my Snake puzzles. After the competition I was sure that I would make again, and this year Deb and LMI give me a chance to hold Snake contest 2. Thanks a lot!

About Instructions: From my side, the most boring thing in preparing a competition is arranging a proper instruction booklet. So mostly I try to use available instructions which I used in previous contests. So most of the examples and explanations in this contest are coming from previous one. So this is the reason of diagonally/at a point differences in explanations.

Answer Format: I remember that last year, some competitors (I remember Nils’ comments, and he was right) mentioned that some puzzles’ answer formats are annoying, it is easy to make a mistake. So this year I wanted to be clear about answer formats. First idea in my mind was to use Tapa answer format. But after Thomas Decathlon 2011, his answer format seemed better to me. So I used it. I tried to make submitting answers easier for competitors. Of course I had to be sure that all arrows referred to last solving steps. So some competitors made tiny mistakes (one or two wrong digits) even if they almost solved the puzzle; like Masyu Snake, Sea Serpent, Calculusnake.

Instant Grading: If I remembered the availability of this system before the competition, I’d surely want to use in this competition.

Congratulations to Ulrich! He is a great snake solver. Also last year he got the first place, he solved 16 snake puzzles in 90 minutes (1.31.27 exact time) [2nd Michael Ley 1.32.45, and 3rd Philipp Weiß 1.45.21]. This year Ulrich has solved 16 snake puzzles in 95 minutes. As last year, 2nd and 3rd top solvers finished all puzzles in 120 minutes. Congratulations to Palmer and Nikola!

Some statistics:
- The puzzle solved by least competitors was Serpentine. It was solved by 31 competitors.
- The puzzle solved by most competitors was First Seen Snake. It was solved by 109 competitors.
- The puzzle with the highest rating was Calculusnake (9.0) and the puzzle with the lowest rating was Serpentine (6,69).
- The puzzle submitted with the highest accuracy was Schlange (%100, 59 competitors), lowest was Masyu Snake ( %76.2, 32/42 competitors)

Thanks a lot for participation,

Best,

Serkan

Thanks Serkan. That was fun, even though I had been a bit dumb for most of the solves. I don't know what it is with me and extra time, but somehow it brings out the best in me. I pushed out the 2 highest rated puzzles in the last 10 minutes. This seems to keep happening whenever there is extra time. Guess I work better under pressure.

I hope more contests will include the Mondays, it's usually an easier time for me to find the free time to enter. (unfortunately I missed that announcement this time)

Is there a solution booklet available?

Just going through these old tests for fun, but found the solution for "The Persistence of Memory" is not unique, which makes me think I may have something wrong? The two grey shapes on bottom right i'll call 'd' and 'NE arrow' can seem to have a number of routes through, and since there's no other shapes like them on board, doesn't seem to constrain this?

Here is my solution. I haven't verified that it's correct but I believe so. I think those two areas were the last to be placed, starting with the bottom left square of the 'd' as an x, as it is touched by the snake, and then the whole path is constrained.





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