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Mean Minis (2020) Author
Posts: 774
  
Location: India | As already noted, scores in this mock are very low, implying that the test became tougher than it was perhaps planned by the organisers. We can perhaps infer that two short 50 minute formats can work well in an offline competition, but it is not optimal for online contests.
Round 1: Two contestants completed all 10. So timing wise, it was planned ok. If we use the grades from scanraid, we arrive at the following:
1 119 moderate
2 126 moderate
3 101 moderate
4 82 moderate
5 106 moderate
6 84 moderate
7 154 tough
8 306 tough
9 166 tough
10 194 tough
I am not sure about the accuracy of this system but this does imply that the 20 pointer was tougher than the 40 and 50 pointers. And the 90 pointer was not tougher than the 70 pointer. In fact, classic 8 was attempted by the least number of contestants (another reason could be that it is difficult to reach to number 8, whether you start from 1 or 10). But overall, the points distibution was good as all "moderate"s had less points than "tough"s.
Round II: Consecutive sudoku was nice with logical steps needed to proceed. Thats the only one I can comment on since I got stuck in most others I tried, and solved diagonal the hard way. Here, we probably tried to fit in more sudokus than the alloted time. In 50 minutes, 5 or 6 sudokus (of the level in the mock) would have been perfect. The main regret is that most participants were unable to even try out a majority of sudokus.
Another reason for people skipping round 2 could be the rigid "20 minute gap" constraint between the rounds. If the two rounds were independent, we would have seen more scores in round 2.
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Posts: 148
Location: France | I had some informatic problems during round 1 so I could try only the easier puzzles, which were very pleasant to solve. I think 50' was a good timing for this round.
Then I tried round 2 but did mistake on mistake and so I decided to stop playing and relax. :bleh:
I came back on the puzzles later, and my impression is that puzzles were globally hard, and some really tough. It would have been great to have the round last about one hour and a half.
Finally, the 20' break between the two rounds didn't bother me. |
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Posts: 25
Location: United States | I would be a bit careful about relying on scanraid ratings for human solving. It doesn't seem to correspond too well with actual testing. For example, see Nick Baxter's remarks about the USSC puzzles here (and from direct experience, the 3rd puzzle of the third round was pretty much the toughest one of the bunch). |
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Posts: 148
Location: France | I agree with this, Scanraid's ratings are sometimes far away from what we could expect. Of course every software will sometimes deliver "strange" scores according to us, but Sudoku Explainer is generally considered more reliable. Anyway I didn't try the tough puzzles yet, so I can't tell about my own experience... |
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Mock Test 14
