Marathon will last 8 full days. The organizers felt that holding this competition so close to the beginning of the year would mean that solvers would have ample vacation time to take the week off from work for solving these puzzles.

Actually in the 21-29 period there are 9 days ;-)

That is even more. But this weekly contest is really interesting. For example we have only 7 days per week in Slovakia.

Its a "marathon week" :P

Edited by prasanna16391 2012-01-14 8:25 PM

Slovak people are very strange

It's a leap year.

Here's a sneak peek from my puzzle in the instruction booklet: http://t.co/LjF5cnOc

I hope you all like masyu. :)

Think I have found an error in the IB. For "Loop the Loop":
"Answer key 1: For each marked row, enter the number of cells of the longest horizontally connected group of
cells inside the loop in that row. For the example, answer key is 945"
BUT the longest INSIDE the loop for the second selected row is 3... the 4 cells are outside the loop.

Or have I misunderstood and it means the longest horizontal stretch (regardless of whether inside or outside the loop)?


And for TAPA the answer keys appear to be reversed

Edited by reesylou 2012-01-16 6:11 AM

It is longest inside the loop (same as Double Decathlon). So 935 is the correct answer key. Updated pdf uploaded.

will there be any partial points for SAMURAI SUDOKU for solving some individual ones.
I know there is nothing indicated regarding this in IB but just to clarify it.

There is no partial points for any puzzle, including the Samurai.

While playing around with the rules of Black and White Loop, I made two puzzles which you can find on the Rätselportal: http://www.logic-masters.de/Raetselportal/Raetsel/zeigen.php?id=000... and http://www.logic-masters.de/Raetselportal/Raetsel/zeigen.php?id=000...

Does anyone have links to other puzzles of the type? I find it hard to get my head around.

Excellent puzzles rob. The 2nd one is really well made with lot of local and global solving. It is always interesting to start solving a loop puzzle from middle of the grid.

I had not seen this type, until Zoltan suggested that we include this type. He shared a smaller example as well (attached with this post)







Attachments
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BWL.Example.8X8.png (26KB - 8 downloads)

I haven't ever seen them online. they did feature in Breinbrekers, but haven't been in there in recent years. I thought I had a few laying around, which I had made. But the only ones I can find use 2 turns between different balls. I don't expect the puzzle to be as heavily clued as yours though. At least they weren't in Breinbrekers.

I don't expect mine to be typical at all, either. They're certainly quite different from the sample puzzle and the one above. Note that "heavily clued" is somewhat misleading, as "empty space" is often a stronger clue than a coloured circle for this type.

Some small questions/clarifications:

1) After 60 minutes has passed for a puzzle, there is absolutely no difference if I submit at 70 minutes or 7000 minutes? So I can just go to bed and submit it another day (if I eventually find the solution!). So no differences to scoring and no potential tie-breaking rules...?

2) As a consequence of that, is it possible to have more than one puzzle started at any time, and then they can be answered in any order?
For example, I could start all 10 puzzles on Saturday, look at them, submit one answer quickly for bonus points, then submit the other 9 during the week but with no time bonuses.

3) When you say the first wrong answer gets a 0.5 minute penalty, do you mean a 0.5 point penalty, or 0.5 minutes less time, or both?

and 4) If I submit wrong answer(s) for a puzzle but never submit a correct answer, will I get negative points or zero points for that puzzle overall?

Bit surprised to see questions so late, I expected them much earlier after posting the IB :-)

I need to mention that we expect lots (yes LOTS) of players to complete most of the puzzles in 60 minutes and grab time bonus.
To answer your exact question, there will not be a difference in scores if a puzzle is submitted at 70 minutes or 100 minutes. In the unlikely event of ties in total score i.e. sum of 9 best scores, we'll use following tie breaker rules to determine the ranks
1. score with 10 puzzles
2. total time taken
Didn't want to complicate the IB with small points, but these would have been posted before the test starts

Yes, you can.
As I mentioned, we expect that the winners will be determined by "Bonus points", not just by "how many puzzles they solved".
There is also one more tweak here which you would have figured out anyway. After starting a puzzle "X", you can't start another puzzle until you submit the correct answer to "X" OR 1 hour is elapsed. This is done so that players don't start multiple puzzles at the same time by mistake, and lose bonus points.


0.5 points, But I think there is no difference.

This is the first time we are having this format (hopefully we'll have more depending upon players' feedback). So the scoring system may not be perfect. It is roughly borrowed from the Screen Tests we had earlier. But if anyone sees major flaws in the system, it is best to have it debated before the test starts.

someone please help out with "BRAILLE WORD SEARCH " ..
How to start??

Since I'm pretty new to puzzle creation, when LMI approached me to create for this test, they were smart enough to ask me to make 3 so that I got comfortable with the type first. So I made two practice puzzles, the first of which I have put up on my blog here : http://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/puzzle-no-18-loop-... and the second one will be put up tomorrow.

Thanks for your practise puzzle prasanna. I had 40 minutes fun with it! Nice to see how the masyu clues influence the loop clues and vice-versa.

Choose a letter, translate it to Braille, scan the grid for occurrences. But you've probably thought of that yourself?

I must agree, that this puzzle was really fun, however it was too huge and surprisingly too easy for me. It takes me only 11 minutes to solve it. I hope that all the contest puzzles will be similarly easy and nice.

The way we look at each puzzle, we consider them as a separate round. So 10 rounds for the whole contest.
It is best that one shouldn't get -ve points from any round. So, you will get 0 points for a puzzle, which has wrong submissions, but no eventual correct submission.