Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Mini Coral
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Statue Park
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

The printing on the mini coral sucked. The middle lines were so light that my printer isn't printing them at all on draft mode, which never happened before on any of the contests I have done previously.

How did you guys get started on the Heyawake? I ended up doing quite a bit of trial and error before finding a contradiction that I could work with. As usual, I am completely lost on the scrabble. Any tips on how to do that kind of puzzle is welcome.

The lines dividing the cells into quarters were meant only for flood-fill. But now that you mentioned, it is not a bad idea to have them little darker.

Had you printed the practice puzzles from LMD?

Seeing that the puzzles on LMD do not have the middle lines to begin with, I failed to see the point.

Sorry I was probably not clear.
I just meant if you had printed and solved them. You would have faced the same problem while doing those practice puzzles.

Anyway, I guess the bottom line is, it wouldn't have been harmful to have them little darker.

I can not correct my solution. I got it wrong on the first try of sudoku, corrected it, written in the solution second time, and when I press submit it is not accepting my new solution, but keeps counting the time. no matter found my mistake

Edited by Zrile13 2014-02-22 6:36 PM

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Mini Coral
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Nanro
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?	Fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

One or two minutes ago I wasn't able to either commit my solution or enter the forums for 2-3 minutes :(. Fortunately furiously pushing the refresh button solved the problem... :D

I could not understand the Yajilin answer key format. Some thing wrong in IB

See image below. Is it clear?

Thanks. Answer submitted.

i love that mini corral awesome :) Few days back i even didn,t know that type and now its one of my favourite :)

Can someone explain the Mini Coral example in the IB. It has two 7s and how the number of cells are calculated.

White areas can contain multiple numbers. There is no restrictions on that.
The clues represent the numbers of connected white areas. (For 7 here, I have made them in yellow. You will notice that 7 cells are connected)
Remember that each white area has to be connected to the edge of the diagram.

If it is still not clear, please post here.

As I suggested to Swaroop, please solve one or two examples on the LMD site before trying the marathon.

Thanks Deb. Actually i thought cells as the smaller ones. But I later understood that cells refer the bigger square consisting of 2x2 smaller ones.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Heyawake
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Statue Park
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
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

Mmmhmm, editing this.

I can't edit it; out of time. :(

---

Comments for every puzzle! In order from the one I did first.

Heyawake
I chose Heyawake first because this cute dinosaur thingy told me about "an insane Heyawake". Or because of this, I don't quite remember (did it yesterday). So I opened it...and totally didn't expect it. Impressive construction, and indeed extremely evil. It took me 50 minutes to notice the opening (I had split the puzzle into three branches by then, bruteforcing at the wrong place), and midway I had to branch again; it was by a lucky guess that the branch I chose to work on is the correct one. I'm still figuring out a logical way here. Easily becoming the best puzzle.

Yajilin
As a nice break, I chose an easy puzzle. Here we have a cute easy puzzle with a blatant theme. At first I feared about missing a few clues (hard to scan rows/columns in a large grid), and indeed it's a bit tough but still quite doable. Puzzle-wise, there's nothing particularly striking, although it's indeed a smooth, easy solve.

Nanro
Of course I had to visit one of my favorite genres, Nanro. Unfortunately this one is the worst in terms of aesthetics (along with Mini Coral), so let's go to the solving path. The solving path is neat and varied, with plenty of tricks indeed. Nice one, but not quite memorable.

Turning Fences
Before doing this, I have found that given all the dots where the loop turns, there is either 0 or 1 loop satisfying it. (The proof is left for the readers.) So I was focusing more onto the dots, finding where the loop turns...before realizing that the loop gives another kind of deduction: if a loop passes straight through a dot, the other two segments aren't used. And there I just realized how Turning Fences is practically a very good mix of two puzzle types, with a regular switch between marking dots and drawing loop segments. I used mostly Minesweeper rules together with this rule...and got stuck after resolving about 5 rows and columns. And since I was sleepy and the timer crossed 60 minutes, I put it off.

The next day, I tried bruteforcing a bit (only about 3 segments!), and things fall through. Dang. Continuing with this solved all of the puzzle.

Probably the difficulty lies more in the unfamiliarity of the puzzle type, and the tendency to think numbers Slitherlink-style. Also, impressive theme; took me a minute or two to get the theme, all done while the timer was ticking...oops.

4x4 Sudoku
Nice theme here, with MARATHON at the top, although I was expecting more than just a random symmetry at the bottom. Also, this puzzle got the award for the most profanity I shouted while working on this puzzle, to find yet another undetermined 2/5 pair... No particular thing in solving path besides that one; the solve is pretty smooth.

Araf
Ah, Araf. The puzzle genre closest to Numberlink among all I know. It has scattered clues without much global theme, but I can identify the powers of two, the Fibonacci sequence, the complex of 7s, the 23456/454545 digit sequences... Local themes while still maintaining an interesting solve. A very varied solve here, with those random large numbers giving a good laugh. I intuited somewhat at the endgame, with the bottom-left and the middle unsolved, just like Numberlinks, but I think there's a good logical path around there which I didn't find in the pressure of time. Well done.

Statue Park
Hmmm... What is the theme... And when it struck me, I was delightfully amazed. The solving path is also clean, with a couple small bruteforces required but not hindering the quality. Of course, I have to botch the solve up somewhere in the middle after 15 minutes, leading me to redo the puzzle again to find the same failure before retracing carefully to find a fallacious assumption. And of course, the final "put these pieces without any black circle around" phase is impressive.

Scrabble
Oh hey Winter Olympics. Is LMI planning the Marathon to coincide with the Winter Olympics or the puzzle is designed around Winter Olympics because the Marathon coincides with it? :P This one I couldn't quite get a clean path. After the first half of the puzzle, I just randomly tried words that connect to the required letters, tweaking things until they work. The theme SOCHI and the five rings is neat though, so I suppose that makes it up.

KakurOH
I was expecting a large amount of large cells. Oh well. The solving path is nice, with only basic Kakuro tricks, although they have to be tweaked somewhat to accommodate the large cells. And yes, there are a few tricks by virtue of the large cells. Only symmetry, but I guess it's hard to squeeze in good visual theme with Kakuro, so well done.

...oh. Who says this is easy. It takes a good squint to figure out where the next part is, a bit like Hitori's observation part. But yeah, if you're told where the next deduction can be done at each step, the solve is very smooth.

Mini Coral
No theme :( This is the second Mini Coral I solved (the first was the example). I discovered some tricks on the fly. Yet I can gloat over my 21-minute time, beating Prasanna. :P (He said he has to redo the puzzle once. Okay, your problem for botching up the solve. :P ) After all that self-boasting, I'd say there's almost nothing remarkable of the puzzle. The ending with the bottom-right, however, is indeed remarkable, close to being a Fillomino or a Nurikabe, and I like that part.

Marathon
Regarding the marathon itself! It's impressive. According to the "five major genres of puzzles" by Dr. Sudoku (number placement, object placement, shading, loop, region division), if you can take placing words to be object placement, all genres appear twice except region division which is only one (Araf), replaced with another shading instead. (I take Mini Coral as shading.) That's perfectly balanced, even though I desire way more shading puzzles due to it being the easiest to do on Paint. The difficulty range is pretty much perfect. I'm missing some global puzzles (puzzles where the deduction is done by observing the entire grid; Palmer's 320 and 334 are good examples) here though; perhaps the large grid is just prohibiting, but eh.

Uhm, that's all from me. Whoa, that was lengthy. I took one hour. :O

Edited by chaotic_iak 2014-02-23 7:13 PM

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Statue Park
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Nanro
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Turning Fences
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.	Scrabble
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Mini Coral
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?	Fairly Nice

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Statue Park
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Nanro
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.	Nanro
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	4X4 Sudoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Mini Coral
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?	Fairly Nice

Heyawake was much try + error for me. All of the others puzzles I likes very much.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Nanro
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Mini Coral
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Scrabble
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

In Nanro, can any region be empty without numbers. Or all regions must have atleast one number.

Each region must have at least one number.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Statue Park
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Araf
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Scrabble
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.	Araf
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Yajilin
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Statue Park
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?	Fair
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice