Most people will know this, but CTRL-click to clear will be CMD-click (apple-click) on a Mac. In the instructions, it says you can start a puzzle 'any time in the next 24 hours' but that's actually 72 hours (with penalty) right?

Gosh I am *so rubbish* at Tapa.

CTC has started. All puzzles from 11-Feb will be used as contest puzzles.

So the CTC rotates around the server time and not GMT like the other contests?

That is correct. It was bit of challenge to make it GMT based. Hope it is not too much of trouble for players. Once the cycle starts, it shouldn't matter which timezone is followed.

CTC has started. All puzzles from 11-Feb will be used as contest puzzles.

One more question. In the standings, is the penalty already added? It wasn't the case for the test puzzles, but that might be because the scoring hadn't been announced yet.

[edit]

Okay more questions. I see we can rewatch our own solves. Will this be the case for other people's solves once the puzzle is over?

I had this question before, but never asked. Will all puzzles be the same size or can we expect larger puzzles?

Edited by Para 2012-02-11 2:41 AM

Thanks for reminding. Yes, standing is computed after penalty is added.
Added "W" column to show that.
Hope to get the "actual" score page ready soon.

The information is stored in LMI server. So it is possible to watch others' solves. I was not sure if anybody would be interested in that.
But we can easily add that feature.

(We probably need players' permission to allow this. I don't know how it works in other websites)

When I've finished my puzzle, do I need to close the window and then load a new page again to see an updated score table?

No. Just click on the date (from the 16 dates shown) again.

Will it be possible to see more than the Top 20 CTC scores somewhere? Us slow puzzlers like to know how we're going too... :)

Edited by kiwijam 2012-02-11 4:08 AM

Are trial puzzles for practice still available? Thanks.

Yes. All puzzles for dates 10th Feb and earlier are trial puzzles.

Is there any way to see your personal rank and standing? I know I'm never going to trouble the top 20, but I like seeing that I'm 160th out of 290 or whatever.

Yes, detailed score page will be available. Allow us few hours to make it ready.

Today's standing page is added (just a placeholder, before we get the final score page)

Link - http://logicmastersindia.com/CTC/score.asp

It seems to me that the 2 minutes penalty is extreme severe.

I dont like the change of rules after the start, but in this case we will get the final points of first puzzle just tomorrow evening. (GMT)

I suggest a 20-30% penalty instead of the fix 2 minutes. I think it would be more correct.

(And in this case I think it is better, if the penalties are added and not multiplied. For instanse 2 mistake is 40% (x1,4) instead of 44% (x1,2x1,2) )

Personally I dislike the idea of solving a puzzle within 24 hours for a whole month.
The penalty regarding the day of solving seems unfair.
It forces you to log on everyday or have your scores reduced.
I don't know if anyone is experiencing any problems, but I somehow can't go to the competition page today.
It doesn't load. :(

Please ignore the post.Message sent to Administrator.

Edited by macherlakumar 2012-02-13 12:37 AM

Is there any provision to view Cumulative Ranking upto the previous day. I see provision to see only the Current day's ranking.

I agree with Valezius and Tamz. This contest is different from any other puzzle contests and daily frequency is essential, it is my opinion it shoud not be taken into account for the calculation of the ranking.

Interesting, interesting because I didn't get it. Everytime we discussed about this contest, we (Deb and me) thought of CrocoPuzzle as an example. CrocoPuzzle has a system, and CTC works same as it. Also if i know correctly, CrocoPuzzle's daily puzzles are really daily puzzles, there are only 24 hours to solve. So we wanted to expand time period. When we made this, we had only one aim: giving a chance to all competitors. Because everyone may not have free time or something. So we made 3 days, and when we made this we thought that we are making a useful thing. So now i see some competitors dont think like us. If we didnt make 3 days, it was better? I don't think so.

You can think of this contest as "one day to solve" (like CrocoPuzzle), not 3 days, and go on.

About penalty points, we built a point system. One variant of the system is penalty points. 50 puzzles may have different difficulties. It'll has 30 seconds puzzles, 15 minutes puzzles; so when we thought about puzzle difficulty distribution we decided on 2 minutes. It is very early to say penalty points is much. Not much according to me. As I said above, we considered CrocoPuzzle system, and we built a thing. CrocoPuzzle gives +5 minutes penalty on each wrong submission, i am saying this because it also has a wide variety of different difficulties, and this system is accepted and being used for a long time. I think 2 minutes penalty seems pretty reasonable compared to it.

So i can say that rules are set and valid for every competitor and there won't be any changes on the system. We'll see how it works during the 50 days. Next year maybe we can come up with an improved system considering the suggestions, but this is the deal for this year.

While crocopuzzle is an everyday puzzle, you cannot compete in a day and it does not hurt your score. You choose to compete when you can, and the goals are both personal and interpersonal. So it works well as an everyday puzzle system because you opt in. I don't know, for a solver who can't do weekdays, or weekends, that this system with a rigid system really matches someone who would appreciate breaks.

Also, to be very clear as I think some people miss this, Crocopuzzle DOES NOT use a 5 minute penalty. This may be what you see reported on the published time ranking page, because until the puzzle is finished the error is not fixed. The actual penalty time is based on the median solve time of all the puzzle solvers without errors. It scales with difficulty. I think it is too punitive, as it is ~100% puzzle time value, and think Valezius at 20-30% is in a much better range with a proportional score. But indeed it can be 1m to 2h on different puzzles.

Is the penalty 2 minutes or 15% now?

I would have assumed it to be 2 minutes as it was clearly mentioned before the start of CTC. But when I look at scores, I see 15% at some places, 120 minutes at some others and, 15% + 120 also at some places.

Hi,
Both of them are there. 2 minutes penalty in case of incorrect submission and 15% or 30% penalty in case of late attempt, that means attempting yesterday or day before yesterday puzzle.
Hope this clears your confusion.

Regards,
Ravi