I very nearly made a solving mistake in the Hard Minesweeper; however, I took the time to add up the numbers, and realized it wasn't the same as the number of mines listed beside the grid. Turns out I had two unsolved cells, one of which was a mine, and I fixed it easily.

Too bad I didn't do the same for the Mutant Tents; the sum of the numbers in my entry was an odd number, which for this particular Mutant would have been an immediate red flag that I had goofed. I also had one other wrong entry; neither of these, I believe, is worthy of the same grace that entering the Mutant answer in the Hard space would be. :)

Whew. That was a blast. Had a very frantic five minutes at the end entering answers, finishing with 19 seconds to spare. Thankfully no entry mistakes, it seems.

I took the test. My first impression the contest is suitable for every puzzle solver. I made some mistakes, and wrong bonus strategy, i lost some points. But everyone lost something:)
Thank you very much Thomas for this smooth puzzle set. I didnt understand how pass the time. I love Battleships(mutant), ABC Connection(M), Tents(M) and Simple Loop(M).

Thank you very much for organizers.

Serkan

Hmmm, seems I completely forgot about time bonuses. If I'm reading the rules correctly, they only matter once you've solved more than 20 puzzles, right?

Great puzzles and loved the format. Nearly hit my target. (I hope you'll go gently on the grading - 130 points lost in transposing would be a good lesson for me though.) More to add later.

it was a great contest, as expected given the author.

as usual I spent the last minutes trying in vain to solve a hard mutant, just to discover after the end that there were other simpler mutants which could have given me maybe 30 more points...
I like the bonus structure and I got a satisfactory bonus - for the first time I even managed to get some (few) time bonus points!!!
Great stuff !!!

Stefano

Edited by forcolin 2010-10-17 5:40 AM

I had one badly verified guess, and one stupid 'greater than' error, but three time bonus points! Woot!

In any case, awesome test again. Thanks a bunch!

that is correct. More than 20 solved (and submitted) correctly

Wasted a lot of time on the hard minesweeper (and got it wrong) and messed up the solution to easy battleships, easy skyscraper (typed in the adjacent column, but solved the puzzle correctly), mutant nurikabe - typed a 1 instead of a 0 at one point. Finished the hard nurikabe with 17 seconds to spare though, so that made up for it a bit...

Wonderful test - loads of fun.

hello, great puzzles. I have question about Smiple loop - mutant. I do not know why my answer is incorect?

regards

ok, sorry. I missed a letter in the answer

regards

We've given you credit on the skyscrapers as you've entered a valid other column; a few others have made column swap changes too, so where it's clear it was an entry mistake while looking at a finished puzzle we've given points.

I can't get past the first 'unplanned' puzzle - namely, where should I be looking to see the 'Document Open Password'? Am I just dense, or is my browser not displaying it properly? I understand you can't just print it here, but some kind of direction would be helpful.

Ahem. It appeared to me that logging in actually constituted a start of the test, and the subsequent Start button didn't look enough like a button to get my attention. Perhaps I should just stay in bed today. :-)

I agree that "Start 20/10 Puzzle Decathlon" button is little small, and not that easy to locate.
We'll make it bigger in subsequent tests.

However note that your timer starts only after you click on that button. So, no one really loses time because of this problem.

Just noticed I've been credited with the points for the easy tomtom puzzle following my submission error. Much appreciated!!

Really great set of puzzles It was very enjoyable

Most of the puzzles were designed very well and my top three
were the mutants of Battleships, Number Skeleton
and TomTom (with mystery number set, nice idea).

Thomas for nice puzzles and LMI for this organization

Zafer

Thomas - I entered the first column rather than the second for the hard nurikabe. Also on the hard minesweeper, I made a rather silly transposition of digits typing in too quickly. The digits are adjacent - which I think is strong evidence in favour of a typing (as opposed to puzzling) error.

I only mention this as the difference between having these two puzzles marked as right will do wonders (+25%) for my score :)

I should also mention good job on the puzzles. Nice design on the easy masyu :)

Having read the thread on the UK forum saying "hey, we all entered wrong columns", I'm surprised you did too. All four got points back though, so you'll get the Nurikabe points.

No go on minesweeper regrading though. It is easy to imagine an incorrect solution with a mine moved by one spot, so I cannot reward an answer there as wrong answers are a lot like right answers on minesweeper.

Ah yeah - I can see exactly what you mean re that "tweak" (naturally I maintain my innocence nevertheless). The pain is in losing so much bonus - especially when I realise I forgot to put in the hard battleships. I don't think there should be too much surprise in my general error-proneness though!

Very nice puzzles

My answer of Mutant Minesweeper puzzle is missing digit for last row (there was no tetromino part in last row and that's why I probably forgot to submit it)
First nine rows in my solution looks correct, is it possible to get points for that puzzle?

Results for the 20/10 Puzzle Decathlon are now available. Three solvers completed all the puzzles correctly and congratulations go to Hideaki Jo, Ulrich Voigt, and Florian Kirch for earning gold/silver/bronze in this test. I expect to see many of the same top solvers doing well next week at the 19th WPC in Poland.

Thanks to all for participating, and thanks especially to Deb and Logic Masters India for assistance in hosting this puzzle test.

Thomas, thanks for taking time out to write this test. I'm sure it was helpful practice for everyone with WPC around the corner.

Apart from many top players participating, this was the most successful test at LMI in terms of numbers of players. That is hardly surprising though, given who the author was.
189 players (out of 226) got non-zero scores.

Thank you everyone for participating!

Now the contest is over I want to mention that the bonus system is seriously flawed: It is easily possible to lose points by solving a puzzle, which is certainly not desirable. For example, it took me about 12 minutes to solve the Number Skeleton mutant: If I hadn't solved it, I would have scored about 19x9=171 instead of the actual 7x10=70 bonus points - plenty to compensate for just one unsolved puzzle (-30 points).

There are two characteristics of your bonus system, which combined lead to this side effect:
1) Both the puzzles and the time bonus have a similar points per minute factor (1200 points / 120 minutes and 10 points per minute, if all puzzles are solved).
2) The decrease in bonus for not having all puzzles solved is very low (factor 9 instead of 10).
Together, this means that one puzzle where you are slower than the average 10 points per minute is worth less, possibly much less than the equivalent bonus score.

Unfortunately, 1) the mentioned Number Skeleton was not my last puzzle and 2) I didn't think about the bonus system in advance. But even if I had, I would have tried to solve all puzzles nevertheless and not cared about my score. (In a WPC, that might be different.)

The puzzles however were excellent (not that I expected anything less). Funnily enough, for the German Championship four years ago I designed a Battleships puzzle very similar to the hard one here, with the same 2-7-2 clues to work with. And I guessed correctly that the mutant Nurikabe would have twelve pentomino islands, but that didn't help much :-)