I see no mention of my heroic one-man performance in the Team rounds for India B in Sudoku :P Anyways, just came online from the reception here for a while, so just thought I'd mention that as it was the one good thing I did all week
http://mellowmelon.wordpress.com/
an interesting and limpid narration of what happened in the puzzle playoffs from melons blog....would be nice if someone gave an account of what happened in the sudoku playoffs
http://mellowmelon.wordpress.com/
an interesting and limpid narration of what happened in the puzzle playoffs from melons blog....would be nice if someone gave an account of what happened in the sudoku playoffs
Well I saw Thomas'(motris) blog post during the competition and I think it covered the Sudoku play-offs well, I don't think anything dramatic happened after the Jakub incident which was highly unfair on him. Jan and Kota spent a long time on an Irregular Diagonal, and just as Thomas remarked about a certain piece of logic they were missing, some 10-15 minutes in, Jan found it. Apart from that, not much to report except the results which I guess are visible on the site.
Prasanna is right; the most interesting remaining aspect of the sudoku playoffs besides the mistakes that frustrated me in my post, was a particularly hard puzzle that took Jan and Kota over 15 minutes to solve (18 total? I'm not sure). A lot of this was not the puzzle -- it was not WSC1 toroidal difficulty level certainly -- and I think was 50% simply the large format affecting them in different ways. Jan made a mistake, had to restart, and used first red circles to mark correct digits in blue and then only wrote red notes and red numbers. You can see his struggle a bit in this photo below -- view the zoom in for the red versus blue note situation. Kota was always on a correct path but just very, very slow. Since I consider these two the best in the world at jigsaw variants, it was a shock to see that result. After Jan finally finished (when we were worried the round might run forever, with the rules not having any way for a puzzle to end) that made the finals 2-1 for Jan. After another Jigsaw interlinked grid Jan secured the win.
The nature of playoffs(puzzle selection,dynamic pool,etc) was much criticized.The considerable variance between standings before playoffs and after playoffs also points to the fact that the format played disturbed the setup on the top.This format had a small postitive that let players like Ulrich cleverly gain some advantage(a lot has been said about that) but perhaps a major
downside which lets you run away with your strong puzzles.Playoffs in future should be more 'learned' in the sense that every player has his weak puzzles(even the champion had a couple ) and if a playoff forces each finalist to do a number of silghtly easier different types(still a single digit figure) ,and those types manage to cover each player's weak ones too(this will not always happen).Not all of that could be done, but something on these lines is really worth.
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