So congratulations to MellowMelon for winning Puzzle Marathon this year - he had impressive timings on several puzzles. Unlike last year, he won 6 out of 12 puzzles this year. deu and xevs take the 2nd and 3rd places respectively.

Individual puzzle wise, there were 6 winners : sai (Multi Skyscrapers, Graffiti Snake), deu (Maxi Loop), muhorka (Liar Diagonal Slitherlink), xevs (Araf), EoHeongMat (Fifty Fifty), and MellowMelon (Masyu, Star Battle, Gapped Kakuro, Mintonette, Nanro, Watches)

Out of 467 participants, 105 players solved all available puzzles and 305 solved at least one puzzle correctly. Thank you for participating.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Nanro
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Maxi Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Graffiti Snake
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

Hi everyone, this was my first marathon discovering this website quite recently. I've enjoyed it most of the time (although it was a bit painful to progress sometimes :) ) . Most of the puzzles were new to me.

star battle: I was most familiar with this puzzle from gmpuzzles, and I knew how to approach this so I attempted this puzzle first. but made silly mistake twice and finished just under an hour. I'm not a fast solver currently. for other puzzles, I didnt attempt to finish other puzzles under an hour.

Mintonette: First time I'm seeing this puzzle. I did some progress on 3 side but didn't find a clue for other regions. It didnt seem like a fun puzzle to me looked like need some trial error play. I didnt spend too much time.

MAxi loop:First time I'm seeing this puzzle. it was fun, didn't need a lot of trial and error. My 2nd favorite.

Graffiti snake : First time I'm seeing this puzzle. solved this in ms paint. it was a lot fun.
My 3rd favourite.

Araf: First time I'm seeing this puzzle. Enjoyed solving this, it took me some time where to start and how to use large numbers.

multi skyscrapers. I solved 5 squares without any trobule but stuck for some time refusing scenario testing. at the end i give up being stubborn. solved at the end but It was a bit painful for me and I guess I missed some hint.

watches: First time I'm seeing this puzzle. it was pretty good and to my surprise it didnt require any trial error. Just getting the direction of 7 clue solved lower half and 5 clue the upper half.

nanro: First time I'm seeing this puzzle. But it was my most favourite to solve. Maybe it's because I'm a huge nurikabe fan. Pretty good solving path.

masyu: I was a bit familiar with masyu and this was the second puzzle I attempted. However, it was the most paintful and I couldnt solve correctly. I couldnt progress much, made an assumption and I didnt get a conflict for 50 %, stuck progressing, made another assumption and after a lot of sweat I've finished it. Double checking the result, I realized one stupid circle missed a turn :( and it didn't appear the mistake was fixable easily, and of course solution key was rejected. this puzzle doesnt look right for a large size since one mistake costs a lot. Probably missed the right way to approcah this, keeping track of the single loop was a headache.

gapped kakuro: it didnt take me long to understand for uniqueness I need to assume edge sums were 45. with that, puzzle can be solved pretty much easily.

I didnt attempt fity fifty and slitherlink, I didn't have time, will try them later.

Thanks for the puzzle contributers and administrators for this fun marathon.

It should be mentioned deu had a higher total bonus; a slight change to the ranking system (best 11 of 12 might have been enough) could have easily made him the winner. I didn't stay very consistent throughout even if I had a few lucky breaks.

No bad puzzles in this set, and a lot of them were nicely thematic (Star Battle, Masyu, Mintonette, Gapped Kakuro's opening, Araf's large regions). Nanro was my favorite solve of the bunch; new and interesting thinking the whole way.

I did notice that, and wanted to mention, but thanks for bringing it up. It is always debatable whether it should be best 11 or best 10. I just went by my hunch that best 10 is better (there were more puzzles this time, and that some of the authors are high profile players themselves and they won't have any benefit if it is best 11). Sudoku Grand Prix rules also played in my mind, which is considering best 75%.

But yes, deu played incredibly well and had very consistent timings.

I would be very interested if someone could walk through their solution for the upper left-most square of the skyscapers puzzle. After solving the other squares, so I had the clues for the bottom and right-hand side of this square, I was able to place all the 5's, but couldn't get much further. I only solved it after some very extensive guess-and-checking. Was there a better way?

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Liar Diagonal Slitherlink
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Fity Fifty
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Star Battle
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	A bit skewed
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Average

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Masyu
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Star Battle
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Watches
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Bit unfair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Liar Diagonal Slitherlink
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Star Battle
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Graffiti Snake
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Liar Diagonal Slitherlink
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Gapped Kakuro
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

(Can anyone help me how to end the quotation and begin my own text??)

Yes, it is solvable without trial and error. An important thing to see: In the right above part of the puzzle, if you fill in the right edges, they can not belong to any circle with a 2 in it. This helps a lot, for you have to use the only ways outside the area which is filled with 2-circles. The 3- and the 4-part I think were quite easy to solve, and with the detection I first described, there is only left a small 1-part-region, which was more difficult in my opinion.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Gapped Kakuro
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Star Battle
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Multi Skyscrapers

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Mintonette
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Graffiti Snake
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Masyu
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

I am not sure if we can really find a solution this problem. Increasing the limit to 75 minutes or so is not a solution, because there will be some players who might finish a puzzle in 78 minutes for example.
We certainly want a cut-off time beyond which the puzzle does not carry bonus points. Of course, if others have some other ideas to handle this, please share.


About the bonus system
---------------------------
Last year, we had extensive debate on how to improve the bonus system, especially about "normalizing" the bonus points. In fact, this year's system is directly based on a suggestion from last year. There are some votes indicating that the bonus system was bit unfair, it is important to know why players thought so. Except Nilz, I can't see any concrete reasons.

Given how popular Puzzle Marathon has been, we would certainly try to make it as an annual event. And if the bonus system has some obvious problems, we need players' input and opinion on how to get it fixed for next year(s).

Thanks to all the authors for these great puzzles. Unfortunately I could not solve all of them due to disconnection of Internet at my home. Anyway whatever the puzzles I could download and solve last week, I found each and every puzzle created very carefully. I liked Fifty-Fifty the most and found Gapped Kakuro little tough to solve.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Watches
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Liar Diagonal Slitherlink
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Gapped Kakuro
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Star Battle
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Multi Skyscrapers
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Mintonette
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

Though i was in a customer workshop for most of the days and lot of deliverables, i was not lucky enough to attempt all puzzles. But the puzzles were so irresistable, so tried couple in whatever time i had.
It was amazing!!, Thanks a lot to for all authors for a wonderful puzzle set.

Warm Regards,
Keshav

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Maxi Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Multi Skyscrapers
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Liar Diagonal Slitherlink
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

This test served as an excellent reminder as to why I stay away from the larger tests on regular competitions. Too prone to little mistakes that come back to haunt you later. The puzzles themselves were excellent - but probably not a competition I repeat in the future (It's not you - it's me).

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	A bit skewed
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Average

So then, a quick post from the author side of me. When me and Deb decided on Graffiti Snake for me, my first 2 thoughts were,
1) Oh, its gonna be tough to follow up Serkan's beautiful puzzle last year.
2) The starting step in previous Graffiti Snakes I've designed generally require some thought and I needed to avoid that since I believe that having a complicated start coupled with a puzzle of a huge size isn't good during competition (Incidentally, I've already had a Graffiti Snake rejected elsewhere in the past for the opening being too tough!). Also, if the start isn't obvious in a genre like Graffiti Snake, the timings might fluctuate a lot.

I quickly put the first thought out of my head and designed the puzzle on some simple locally observable openings, the notably obvious one being the right bottom corner, with the crowding of clues around that area. The rest of the puzzle flows fine after that moving upwards.

I'm glad and pleasantly surprised that its gotten into the top 3 for a lot of solvers.

Hi everybody,
I want to thanks Deb and his team for preparing such a great contest. I want to appreciate all puzzles by 11 authors, who made really great job while constructing their puzzles. I really enjoyed the solving, even I had many troubles (printer, repeated submitting of answer key with small mistakes, Jehovah´s Witnesses knocking at the door).

As I post before, my favourite puzzles were these three:
Watches (great puzlle, Serkan!)
Nanro (All three mentioned problems appeared within solving this puzzle. However I really love this puzzle type, and I hope we may expect some Nanro contest in few months)
and Diagonal Liar Slitherlink (although I had empty grid after 30 minutes with no clue how to start).

The hardest puzzles for me were Star Battle, Fifty-Fifty and Skyscrapers. I was not able to find out the logic of these puzzles, but it is just because I am not so versed in these types, so I solved them only by using brute force (guessing, guessing and one more guessing). I am still very ashemed, sorry :(

I am quite surprised that Araf is one of the most appreciated puzzles. I had some really good feeling when the puzzle masters (as Tiit, Neil, Hideaki, Jakub, Zoltan and many others) voted for my puzzle. Maybe I am the one who decided (by my vote for Nanro), that Nanro is the most favourite puzzle of this contest (right before Araf). But I do not regret my "defeat" because Nanro is a puzzle genre I enjoy the most since Tapa in 2009!

At the end, here is my story of discovering Araf.
We firstly noticed Araf (by Serkan) at WPC in Poland. Our team have no clue how to solve such a puzzle. In the bus we saw some Turkish players to solve some Araf puzzles just by one stroke and could not believe it. In the competion nobody of us tried to solve Araf. However we had a great fun with using word Araf in meaningless meanings during the championship (What do you want for breakfast? Araf!).

Just after the WPC we made small competition in guessing that puzzles and I won, so I had a feeling to be the Araf master of my country in that moment. Few months later I used small puzzle (5x5) in a regional tournament, where only Matej Uher solved it by logic. In the autumn we think about using Araf at 24HPC, but it was never used in our set (it was too difficult even without Araf), but Serkan published that puzzle in Akil Oyunlari last year.

Now is Araf one of my favourite puzzle genres and I am very delighted that you liked my puzzle. Thanks!

Edited by greenhorn 2013-03-12 1:17 AM

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Watches
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Nanro
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Graffiti Snake
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

I like the marathon, independently timed structure a lot! I also like the idea of giving a substantial point value simply for correct submission, with bonus for beating a certain speed threshold. I'd like to see higher threshold (90 min, or 2 hours) with increasing bonus values for increasingly fast times - i.e. bonus for 45 minutes vs 46 minutes would be greater than bonus for 65 vs 66 minutes. I think it would allow for more meaningful rankings among those of us in the kind-of-fast but not superfast levels. (I am not unbiased, here, I finished several puzzles between 60 and 70 minutes...Blast!!) I suppose I think there is a real distinction between finishing in 90 minutes and finishing in 790 minutes.

I'd never solved an Araf before this puzzle was announced. The only place I'd seen them (I now know) was in Akil Oyunlari as an instructionless puzzle... and I couldn't work out the rules! Now that I know the rules, I don't think I'd ever have worked it out, they seem pretty anti-intuitive- to me, it would be more natural if the area was exactly equal to one of the numbers or something like that, rather than somewhere in between, but I guess that would change the logic quite a bit and not be as good. So anyway, once this competition was announced, I learnt the rules and did the example puzzles linked to earlier in this thread, but I didn't really have high hopes, because like I said the rules seemed a bit random (sorry Serkan). However, I thought the actual puzzle was great, and surpassed all my expectations- it had lots of logic I hadn't really appreciated before, and it just seemed to work really well. That's why I voted for it, so thanks for designing it!

The trouble is, if you know you can only get bonus points within 60 minutes, lots of people will relax after that time, and take a break or whatever. So the person who solved it in 790 might have spent less time on it than the person who clocked 90. You definitely need a threshold, because people can't spend hours on end solving one puzzle, and I think 60 minutes works well.

Fair enough. I went back and looked at the breakdown of the scores, and there were only 8 people tied with a score of 500, out of 305 who submitted any correct solutions. That's not bad. If there were hundreds, or even dozens, of people tied at 500, I'd stand more firmly by my suggestion.

On an unrelated note, for the first day or two of the contest, I was only able to "sign out" a single puzzle at a time, but later it became possible to sign out more than one puzzle at the same time. Was this according to plan, or was there a decision during the contest to change it? I have no objection either way, I am just curious. (Though I really liked the concept of having to commit to an answer, for better or worse, before opening the next puzzle.)

There was a constraint that a if you start a puzzle X, you can't start another puzzle Y until you submit X or one hour is over, whichever is earlier. This was to done so that players shouldn't start new puzzles by mistake there by losing bonus. But the problem was that, if you don't reopen/refresh your browser, the system didn't check for the 1 hour period and kept on disabling new puzzle starts.
I'm pretty sure your observation is related to this.