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Posts: 11
Location: Bulgaria | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | Just right | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | Just right | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Very nice | |
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Posts: 43
Location: United States | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | Just right | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | A bit too many puzzles | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Very nice | |
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SM 2020 (Math) Author
Posts: 417
Location: India | Clearly the worst of all the LMI tests i have taken so far.... |
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2021 World Sudoku+Puzzle Convention Organizer
Posts: 1775
 
Location: India | kishy72 - 2012-12-23 9:33 PM
Clearly the worst of all the LMI tests i have taken so far....
Do you mean that with respect to experience or performance? I think you can elaborate so future improvements can be made (I do believe that was the main point put forward for needing a comments box in the feedback page). |
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SM 2020 (Math) Author
Posts: 417
Location: India | I meant the test not my performance....My performance is more or less below average in each test....I wish i had unchecked the Ratings checkbox...There was no way to type possible numbers in a box....Besides I dont think the sudokus were arranged according to difficulty levels or 'perceived difficulty levels' as the IB goes....Basically the sentence looks like a joke to me .....overload and a total waste of sudokus....dont like the system which awards points for partially filled cells at all.....Right from the 2nd sudoku none went right...After 20 - 25 mins i was waiting for the test to end....Basically was pressing cntl and submit in each sudoku hoping for atleast 1 sudoku where there would be 'real flow' till the end....sadly none had(i felt)....every sudoku every cell i had to labour to find a number....A TOTAL DAMPENER of spirits after the last 2 months of beautiful sudokus in beginner's |
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SM 2020 (Math) Author
Posts: 417
Location: India | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Very skewed | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | Too many hard puzzles | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Below Average | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | Way too many puzzles (too little time) | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Exteremely unfair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Below Average | |
'No comments' |
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2021 World Sudoku+Puzzle Convention Organizer
Posts: 1775
Location: India | Most of your criticisms are valid, and of course we are happy to hear any kind of ideas/feedback as this kind of Screen Test using Sudokus was a concept tried for the first time here. I feel I can answer some of your points though.
The perceived difficulty part is based on test solvers' times which is the same methodology used in mostly any contest as far as I know, and the same I did for my own test too. Obviously, sometimes individual opinions differ from the test solvers' times.
The part about the puzzles not having a flow towards the end, well, the IB states that the attempt was made to place the easier grids in A and B, so thats an indicator that beginners should probably concentrate on solving the stuff at the start as best they can.
The last part too, I feel I can answer. This is, in spite of the small sized grids, a monthly test, and I think we have given warnings in the Beginners' topic that a monthly test is much harder than a Beginners' Contest. I realize of course that you've given other monthlies before, and I'm sure you found them really difficult too compared to the Beginners' Contests. I think its just the fact that you had a 5 minute window per grid to solve here that might make it seem a bit more annoying if you don't finish, but thats probably the reason for the partial points.  |
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Posts: 25
Location: United States | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | A bit hard | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Fairly Nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | A bit too many puzzles | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Average | |
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Posts: 15
Location: Hungary | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Perfectly balanced | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | A bit hard | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | A bit too many puzzles | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Average | |
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Posts: 15
Location: Hungary | Not sure how much of this has been said before, couple of comments on the UI.
- During solving the puzzle, it is a convenience feature if, in addition to picking cells with the mouse, you can also navigate between cells using the arrows. I don't like the fact that such arrow key navigation "jumps over" a cell if it has a given number. I am pretty used to navigate in tables with arrows, be it Excel tables or Croco-Puzzle puzzles, I tend to make very fast movements like "3 to the down and 2 to the right". But ignoring given cells throws this up. I believe that ensuring your arrow keys always make a movement of one unit square would much more resemble industry standard, thereby improving de facto usability.
- The submit button was not very well placed at the far bottom. The confirmation request for submitting unfinished grids is a good idea, though, as one can accidentally miss a cell or two. Then again, one comment regarding the "force submit" - the help says Ctrl-click to force submit: this is actually alt/option-click on a Mac (well, at least on mine), may be worth showing that info as well.
- It would be nice to have a way to put pencil marks into cells, e.g. either-or notes or number ranges or so. I understand this being a screentest, that may not have been the intention, but this interface is much more promising to only ever be used for the odd screen test, and once it grows out of that box, such features might come in handy.
- I overran 60 minutes without being told, I notice this was raised before.
Hope that helps - thanks for the work in the UI and the contest
Zoltan |
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Posts: 19
Location: United States | Zoltan -
There's a checkbox in the lower right you can uncheck so that the arrow keys don't jump over givens. |
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An LMI Player with Sudoku ratings 500- | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | A bit hard | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | Way too many puzzles (too little time) | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Average | |
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An LMI Player with Sudoku ratings 500- | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | A bit hard | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | Way too many puzzles (too little time) | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Very nice | |
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Location: India | Zormac - 2012-12-24 3:12 AM
Not sure how much of this has been said before, couple of comments on the UI.
- During solving the puzzle, ...........
Zoltan Hi Zoltan, Thanks for the detailed input.
Issue about force submit not being clear enough in Mac - It was a miss from my part.
Not having pencil marks - Regular Sudoku tests have pencil marks feature. It was disabled purposefully for this test. I realize it is a debatable decision, and has been noted by other players too.
Players not being notified after 60 minutes - probably the biggest flaw here. |
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An LMI Player with Sudoku ratings 500- | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Perfectly balanced | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | Just right | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | Just right | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Very nice | |
Great format - the variety of tests swas very challenging. Increasing the difficulty as you went was a lot of fun too. I would enjoy seeing this format again. |
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Posts: 152
Location: United Kingdom | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | A bit skewed | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | A bit hard | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Fairly Nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | A bit too many puzzles | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Average | |
Having a no pencilmark interface is fair for a screentest - after all you are challenging people to solve in their heads - but this is inconsistent with a very powerful undo system which encourages systematic guessing for the harder puzzles.
Given how hard some of the puzzles were, I'd have liked to have seen pencilmarks.
My only other gripe is that puzzles were either quite easy or quite hard, with not too much in between. Other than that, slick as usual. |
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Location: India | An LMI player - 2012-12-24 6:55 PM
Great format - the variety of tests swas very challenging. Increasing the difficulty as you went was a lot of fun too. I would enjoy seeing this format again. Thank you so much.
detuned - 2012-12-24 8:19 PM
Having a no pencilmark interface ... Thanks Tom for very valuable inputs. Certainly will be useful if/when we consider this format again. I'm tempted towards having no pencil mark, no Undo, but also puzzles that don't require any of them. I thought most puzzles in this test fall into that category, but looking at overall feedback, that does not seem to be the case. |
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An LMI Player with Sudoku ratings 500- | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | Just right | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | Just right | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Fairly Nice | |
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Posts: 45
Location: India | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | A bit hard | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Fairly Nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | A bit too many puzzles | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Average | |
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Posts: 31
Location: United States | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | A bit skewed | | | What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles? | A bit hard | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test? | Way too many puzzles (too little time) | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | | | What is your opinion about the solving interface? | Very nice | |
Nice test! There were a few too many hard puzzles among the first 10, I'd say, where I expected them to be relatively easy. There were also a few really beautiful puzzles where you could solve easily if you think about them the right way (which I often only noticed after guessing turned out to give a contradiction, then I'd see what I should have noticed in the first place) -- those were really nice.
I also learned a lot about some types of puzzles where I usually solve on-screen by making tons of notes!
I think the trickiest part is when there's unusual rules and the inverse rule is also in effect; it makes pretty puzzles, but hard to solve on-screen with time pressure.
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Posts: 152
Location: United Kingdom | No problem - and despite the seemingly indifferent colours provided by my feedback, I quite enjoyed the test. Having a quick scan of the results, there seem to be a strikingly large proportion of wrong entries. My best guess would be a large portion of these occurred as a result of guessing. Then again, this will always be a problem with difficult puzzles in smaller grids.
I'd be very interested to see a variation of this format, again with specific time limits per puzzle, but where the solver can choose the order in which puzzles are solved... |
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Location: India | detuned - 2012-12-25 12:06 AM
I'd be very interested to see a variation of this format, again with specific time limits per puzzle, but where the solver can choose the order in which puzzles are solved... When I explained Branko (my perennial test solver) about this format, that is the first question he asked. "Will solvers be able to choose the order in which they want to solve?" So certainly something to keep in mind for the next one. |
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Location: India | detuned - 2012-12-25 12:06 AM
No problem - and despite the seemingly indifferent colours provided by my feedback, I quite enjoyed the test. Having a quick scan of the results, there seem to be a strikingly large proportion of wrong entries. My best guess would be a large portion of these occurred as a result of guessing. Then again, this will always be a problem with difficult puzzles in smaller grids.
We can now view each others' exact submissions here |
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2021 World Sudoku+Puzzle Convention Organizer
Posts: 1775
Location: India | So this finishes with me being the only one in the top 10 to not have a single best time on an individual grid. Never thought consistency would be my positive in a test :P |
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Location: India | Sudoku Screen Test is over. This was a different test from regular monthly tests, with every sudoku having time limit and solving in sequence. It was our first attempt, so certainly many points to consider in the next one, if we ever have that. Many thanks to all of you who shared their feedback.
Nevertheless, I sincerely hope everyone had fun to some extent.
Congratulations to uvo, janoslaw and misko for taking the top 3 positions. TiiT and jaku111 are really close to the top 3.
Prasanna has a top 10 rank for the second time now, and it is very significant achievement. Congratulations to Prasanna, Rishi and Rakesh for the top Indian positions.
Edited by debmohanty 2012-12-25 7:35 AM
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LMI Screen Test #3 — December Sudoku Test — 21st-24th December
