Introduction

Welcome to the next installment in our daily contest series, Rassi Silai Race. The second journey will take participants through a set of Rassi Silai puzzles. Rassi Silai is a new-ish genre that is slowly gaining popularity. For more, check out the about page for rules, visual explanations and history. The race kicks off on 22nd February 2022 at 8:00 AM IST with the first official puzzle and then a new puzzle releasing every 30 hours. The final official puzzle will be released on 13th March 2022 at 2:00 AM IST. There will be 21 puzzles, with the first five being trial puzzles, after which the actual contest will begin, containing 16 puzzles. Some of the trial puzzles are already available for you to try. The order of puzzles is not necessarily according to difficulty. Please read the following rules carefully.

Participation:

1. Participants must solve within the 30-hour window of the puzzle to be considered for the official ranking of that day (i.e., the submission must be before the 30-hour window ends).
2. Participants can still solve the puzzle outside the official window but won't be awarded any points for that day.
3. The contest page will show which puzzle is active at any given moment.
4. Click on the "Start" button to start the puzzle. A new window will open. The puzzle page does not contain rules.
5. If you prefer a different display size, the participant can resize the puzzle using the “Resize” button -> Display size -> Apply Changes.
6. The default mode is set to "Composite" for a specific Rassi Silai mode, but solvers can go to "Settings" and turn OFF Penpa-lite to access other modes. Some alternative ways to have lines that look different to use as markings are the Area/Field-->Edge/Aux Sub-mode, or Object-->Akari Sub-mode within the Composite mode itself, but note that the lines would need to be redrawn in green to get credit.
7. Once the solver thinks they have reached a solution, they must click the "Submit Solution" button at the bottom of the grid.
8. Instant grading is enabled. If the solution is correct, a pop-up will appear saying so, and the player can rate the puzzle and provide any feedback, which will appear on the discussions page. Next, there will be a link to go back to the contest page.

Features:

Once the participant has successfully solved the puzzle, the following will be available on the contest page:

1. Ratings – Participants can rate each puzzle.
2. Discussion – Participants can share comments or discuss the puzzle on the "Standings/Feedback" page. Each puzzle has its own discussion page where comments are only visible to those who have completed the puzzle.
3. Replays – Participants can check out other players' solution approaches by clicking on "Standings" and then clicking on individual times.

What's new after Tapa Train?

1. Penalty – Following some feedback, we have changed the penalty system. Now, with one wrong submission, a player's final time will be 110% of their actual solve time to reach the correct solution. With each further wrong submission, 20% will be added (e.g., with 3 wrong submissions, the final time will be 150% of the solve time, etc.
2. Reactions – Following the success of the system on the CTC Discord, we have enabled seven main puzzle-related reactions which players can mouseover to understand. These will show up on the ratings areas, while the discussion thread will have other reactions and emojis too as before.
3. Real-time replays - We now have Real-Time replays available for any solves that are below 20 minutes.

😍Yayyyy

Replay feature is just superb ...

The 'daily contests' link (under 'more contests') appears to redirect to an unrelated site.

Two small suggestion before the start of the contest puzzles:

* Make the small dots a little bit bigger or make them appear on a layer above the line segments, so that it's easier to see them, if there is already an end of a line segment in that cell.

* Change the text "Rating" on the page where you choose the stars to "Difficulty rating" if that's the intended meaning. (In that case I'm also not sure if this information, that is based on other contestants solves, should be available before you finish the puzzle.) If that is not a difficulty rating, then it is also not clear what exactly do you want, since a lot of popular sites (like Grandmaster puzzles and the Logic Master Germany portal) uses a star ranking for difficulty and there is already emojis to describe the puzzle.

I will reply on the 1st. We are changing it to put a "Yellow" shading into the cell instead of the dot so that it's clearly visible. Hopefully, the changes will be available before Trial 5.

Count me among the grumpy dinosaurs if you wish, but I'll sit out this event. Penpa is fairly good for what it is, but it's still very far from solving on paper from a user experience perspective. It probably took me a while to learn when I was a little kid, but by now I'm quite adept at using paper and pencil, and that is a very very high bar for any kind of user interface to compete against (largely because of another equally amazing piece of technology: the eraser). Penpa has a learning curve, not an unreasonably steep one from what I can tell, but for me it just kills the enjoyment of the puzzle to not be able to just draw harder/lighter lines by pressing harder/less hard on my screen, and quickly erase the lighter lines. (I'm sure there are features to do something equivalent, but they require navigating a user interface.)

Also, on the second practice puzzle, Penpa let me put stuff into the grayed area and it wasn't clear (until I counted and convinced myself it couldn't be) whether that region was meant to be part of the puzzle or not. (I guess that's why there are practice puzzles at the start, so people who will be doing this seriously can figure out how to live with Penpa.)

What we intend is quality rating. I see the words "quality rating" wherever stars are asked. Can you specify where you see just "rating"?

The first part is a personal preference issue which we can't do much about. As you said, there are ways to do whatever you mentioned (I even noted two possible ways in my introduction post) but I agree it can be difficult for someone who is used to paper solving, and I can sympathize. Overall though, since there are so many contests that are catering to either only-paper solving or allow a mix of both, its nice to have an only-online one once in a while, allowing for the fact that it may not be for some players.



The second part, you aren't the first one, and I will again direct you and others to my introduction post as well as the "About" link at the top of the contest page where we have divulged as many details about the rules, visual clarifications, penpa clarifications, etc. as we can. At some point I think its fair for us to expect that people will read the information we are putting out, or at least, expect surprises if not.

It does say "Quality Rating" now. I'm 90% sure it was only "Rating" when I did Trial 1 some hours ago, because I really wondered what kind of feedback you expect from me there. Ok, so that's a "quality" rating, whatever kind of information you expect to get from it. It does not let me give less than 1/2 star though 😜

Ouch.... Fixed now.

Ah. The problem is that I had honestly NOT noticed the existence of an "About" link or its significance, either on the contest page or in your introduction post (which I must admit I read too quickly). In general, I find the new visual identity of LMI's website a bit difficult to get used to in terms of where to find information. In particular, the dark green navigation bar at the very top of the LMI page had previously almost always been used only for navigation through the site, not to locate important information related to the specific contest one is about to attempt, and it honestly did not occur to me that this might contain a link I should follow before accessing the puzzles. "About" in a menu that normally contains the main LMI navigation bar is something I might have expected to point to general information about LMI. It used to be that all the information that might be needed live during a contest was in the middle of the page + on the IB/PB, so it takes a bit of adjustment to get used to new possibilities about where the information might be found.

Concerning the overall LMI interface, I must concur that I just noticed today that the dark green bar now contains different links when viewing a Contest page (I had previously wondered why there was no longer a direct link to the forum contest thread)... I guess I'm a bit slow on the adaptation to the new interface 😅

Having now read the "Rule & Info" link, I have a question. It says :
-----------
Penpa Interface
Only the lines will be checked as part of solution checking.
The endpoints do not need to be explicitly marked by circles.
-----------

I think I tried this (not marking the endpoints) on a trial and recieved a wrong answer. Can you confirm this point ? I will try it again on the last Trial but an official check would be nice 🙏

I can confirm that endpoints are not required. You can also check the replay of all other solvers, many have not marked all the endpoints (including myself). You can try again on last Trial and let us know if you face any issue.

Confirmed on the last Trial, it works perfectly, thanks 👍
(next time I'll read the Rules before doing the trials 😆)

Hola

That's all fair. I can understand that any time there are changes its difficult to get used to them. What I can promise you is there is value in learning and getting used to these things, because we will be having more such daily online-only contests, and the new website look is here to stay because it aligns more with our approach to be mobile friendly in addition to being good to laptop users too. Maybe some of our regular participants were comfortable and didn't see the need for a change but we are seeing a lot of newer solvers get interested with these changes and hope that the regular ones find them worth adjusting to. Thank you for the open discussion anyway!



Also, we did take in your feedback and have changed "About" to "Rules & Info", hopefully that's clearer now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX93U2jTaN8



A video posted on the Channel Unshackling Sudokus and Puzzles on how to solve a Rassi Silai puzzle with Tips and Tricks explained. Do watch the video and subscribe if you haven't done so yet :)

👍

Thanks for a great contest with great puzzles. This time, I looked a bit more into the scoring system. First, I could not find any description how it works.

Let's just ignore all the "Early Bird" stuff. For me it doesn't make sense in this sort of contest (big number of very easy puzzle with sub minute solve for a lot of people), but why not.

If we start at the "Leaderboards" page, there is a column "B" in the table with my personal points. I have no idea how these values are derived beside the vague description below the table. But these numbers suspiciously add up to 1600. If we really look into the details, the puzzle where I got the most points in this table (more than twice the amount of any other puzzle) is the one where I had the worst performance in the contest by far: Puzzle No. 16 (had to restart because of a mistake. And then at the end there was a "Something is wrong" message, which turned out to be not about the puzzle solution, but about my dropped internet connection, which I found out after looking for a mistake for 5 minutes. That's another topic where some change in the error message might be good.)

If I look at the "Statistics" page, there are various values I don't understand. I can't find the values in the "50th player" and "100th player" column anywhere else, especially not in the detailed ranking of the corresponding puzzle. (Also the marking HH:MM for these columns is probably wrong.). In the "Puzzles - 2" tab, I can again see my "B" ratings without any idea how it is calculated.

With that sum being 1600, it's save to assume that the main contributor to the ranking (beside solving all puzzles) are the "Type A" points. The contest started with 350 puzzlers and as expected, there is a slow decline. There were a stable 200-250 successful solvers per puzzle. Of these, up to 60% got nothing. That's just not a good idea in my opinion. Of course it doesn't matter if you can constantly get Top100 results, but a lot of people (even experienced puzzlers) can not. So for all but the maybe 50 people who can constantly get Top100 results, the ranking correlates very badly with the performance.

Edited by Realshaggy 2022-03-14 4:23 PM