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Location: India | Jacoblance - 2015-03-13 6:06 PM
I do not understand why EKBM, deu, and willwc do not have score equal to 400 plus their bonus. The rest of the top 20 have bonus+400 as their score and I can't find what separates those three. In fact, it looks like they are the only three people for which their score and their bonus do not differ by a multiple of 50. The "Bonus" field is the total bonus in 10 puzzles, without discarding the two worst. As of now, these are the only three players who have got bonus in 9 or 10 puzzles. So "Points" is not equal to bonus+400 for them. |
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Location: India | forcolin - 2015-03-12 5:20 PM
Very nice set of puzzles, very challenging and of excellent quality, thanks to all the authors (particularly to Riad for using my name)
In reply to other earlier comments: I do not find anything wrong in the puzzle being hard. It's a marathon. The balance of the difficulty level is excellent.
What can be improved is the bonus mechanism. It is unfair that for at least 4 cases the 20th fastest solver has no bonus (in the case of summon even the SECOND fastest solver has no bonus!). I know that in the past there have been long discussions about the bonus mechanism. IMHO the rank bonus should not have any connection with the time bonus. also, in this case, perhaps setting a time bonus level different for different difficulty level of the puzzles (for example: 45' for the easy puzzles, 1 hour for the intermediate, 90' for the hard ones) could have been better.
The scoring system has been more or less same since the very first year, with minor tweaks. Every year, when we start planning marathon, we start with the intention that the puzzles will be of roughly similar difficulty, with enough players solving under 60 minutes. But this has never become a reality, and the relative difficulty of the puzzles has very wide range.
I am starting to like the idea proposed by Stefano (and many others) that each puzzle should have different time targets for bonus. 45 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes sound good too, just that we (as organizers) have to be extra careful while categorizing the puzzles (e.g. Nurikabe shouldn't have been in easy category). But within each puzzle, do we continue with the bonus system of the past?
The other approach I was thinking is that, lets say, in each puzzle we give bonus to top 50 solvers. 50 for the top player, 49 for the next, so on. This has an indirect implication that a player won't know how much time to spend before "giving up" on a puzzle. That is certainly not a nice situation to be in, but it simplifies the scoring system a lot. It also means we can't allow very hard puzzles where the 50th best time might run more then 2 hours.
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| | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Statue Park | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Hidoku | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Fillomino | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | A bit skewed | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Average | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | |
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Posts: 67
Location: France | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Coded Snake | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Scrabble with Loop | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Turning Fences | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | |
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| | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Battleships | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Fillomino | | | 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 did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | |
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Classics & Regions (PR 2016/17) Author
Posts: 170
Location: Germany | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Hidoku | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Scrabble with Loop | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Battleships | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | |
Lots of fun as usual, thanks to the other authors and the organizers.
After a poor start on the Turning Fences, I'm a somewhat surprised at how well I got through. Even some of the "easy" puzzles were hard enough that I felt I was solving a bit beyond my level, which usually leads to breaking a puzzle or two.
As for individual puzzles, apart from the lovely Hidoku, it's hard to rank them. They were uniformly excellent. (I chose "fairly balanced" for the puzzle types due to the lack of Sudoku or other latin square puzzles.)
Regarding my contribution, I'm a bit unhappy that it turned out to be clearly too hard. By the time we figured this out, it was too late to fix. I feel like the solve is both a bit too hard in terms of individual steps, as well as too linear. Add to that it's a type that does not seem to lend itself to guessing, and it's not particularly well known.
I'm most worried this will turn people off the type, if this is the first puzzle they see. Do try some easier ones, I think it's a very elegant and rich puzzle type. On that note, I'm quite sure that it is in fact suitable to large grids; it should be quite straightforward to construct a puzzle of half the difficulty. |
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Posts: 9
Location: Finland | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Turning Fences | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Scrabble with Loop | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Summon | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Perfectly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | |
Thank you all who participated in creating this contest!
My special thanks will go to Riad Khanmagomedov for creating the Scrabble with Loop; personally I don't like crosswords etc., but this individual puzzle had quite many names of my friends from WPC/WSC and, thus, it brought in to my mind many happy memories :) |
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| | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Meandering Numbers | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Battleships | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Hidoku | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Fairly Nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | |
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Posts: 2
Location: Slovakia | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Fillomino | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Hidoku | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Battleships | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Perfectly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | |
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Posts: 315
Location: The Netherlands | My ranking is better than I expected. It all felt a bit slow today, but I guess that still matched what others did. I still felt a bit overwhelmed by the size of some puzzles, which is why I don't generally like really large puzzles. But I still enjoy competing in this.
As for the puzzles.
Statue Park: I had a bit of a slow start, missing an opening in the left top corner for a bit. Once I got over that step it was a smooth solve. I enjoyed it.
Fillomino: This one didn't go that well. I got stuck near the end, because I made a small error. I spent about 5 minuted fixing it. When I found my error I felt like an idiot.
Nurikabe: I didn't find a nice logical path for this one. I kind of just ended up trying to pack in the 6's in the bottom till it worked. I might have missed something. I knew this wasn't going to be my puzzle, too many people with experience solving large nurikabes
Meandering Numbers: I enjoyed this puzzle. I never really got stuck, but it's sometimes hard to find the right region in these puzzles.
Turning Fences: I hoped I had a chance to get first time on this one. But some small mistakes made me lose a few minutes. The lack of 0s and 4s, probably made it a harder puzzle.
Regional Battleships: I wasn't sure what kind of puzzle this was going to be, but it turned out to be a kind of Star Battle type. The construction was pretty well done. One of my favourite solves in the set.
Regional Coded Snake: I took ages to get started. I thought the opening wasn't very straight forward, but maybe I missed something. Then I broke it at the end. So I restarted. Halfway trough the solve I realised how to fix my old solution. That's why I missed out on the hour mark. I thought the combination of the regions, Snake clues and Coded clues was a bit much for a competition. I don't mind combining a lot, but not that much a fan in competition. Still a nice solve when I don't mess up.
Scrabble with Loop: I think was a fun puzzle. I think throwing in a Loop into a Scrabble makes me solve it a bit faster than normal. Word puzzles aren't my thing, loop puzzles are. I had fun with all the names of puzzlers.
Hidoku: I had fun solving this puzzle. I have written a few of these puzzles and know to just treat it as a path puzzle and just use the numbers as guides. In this size it's sometimes a bit hard to find the right places to makes progress, but got here in the end. I liked the long unclued path. I figured it was somewhere given the largest clued number.
Summon: This was a monster. It took me about 50 minutes to find the right opening. I thought I had found something, but that in the end gave me nothing. Then when I found the right opening I still made a few mistakes, usually involving not realising a number was already in a larger area. And after that I also ignored one clue, which finally got me to the end. It was really well constructed, but maybe a bit too hard for this purpose. Over 2 hours is a bit much.
Thanks to all the writers. I again enjoyed myself. |
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| | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Nurikabe | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Fillomino | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Turning Fences | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Fairly Nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Very fair | |
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Posts: 12
Location: Spain | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Summon | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Turning Fences | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Coded Snake | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Perfectly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Bit unfair | |
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2021 World Sudoku+Puzzle Convention Organizer
Posts: 164
Location: Slovakia | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Battleships | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Turning Fences | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Summon | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | |
All the puzzles were very really nice, but most of them was too difficult. After solving all of them within 30 hours I am frustrated more than ever before. |
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Posts: 6
Location: ITALY | I had problems in submission of Battleship. As you can see I submitted several times in few seconds the answer. I understood only later how to send it. If it is possible, please don't consider it as a wrong submission. |
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Posts: 18
Location: Germany | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Battleships | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Scrabble with Loop | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Hidoku | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | |
Maybe the difficult puzzles should get more points than the easier ones instead of 50 points each. Yes, the opinion about difficulty is different, but the overall order was quiet correct and maybe the number of solvers can be an additional hint. |
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Posts: 59
Location: United States | Three favorites--scrabble with loop, meandering numbers, summon. The summon puzzle was quite hard, but it had a satisfying learning curve for me. This was a new puzzle type for me.
Overall quality--simply excellent. Beautiful thematic construction and several novel puzzles/variants to me. No website or printing problems whatsoever.
I found the puzzles somewhat unbalanced. In particular, the Regional Coded Snake was utterly impossible for me, far more difficult than summon (the second hardest). Normal snake puzzles are a bit of a slog, trying out various bits and pieces until all of the numbers fit. But, here there is only a code. So it is trial and error and error and error and error and error... I put in over 6 hours over three separate evenings just on this one puzzle, far more than any of the others, and far beyond when it stopped being fun. I gave up for the first time ever. Just gave up. Ugh do I detest snake puzzles. Every change I tried would break one of the complex rules, usually on the other side of the board. So it was a bit of a wash...the snake puzzle attempts detracted from some of the pleasure from solving the others. Just my opinion...some people seem to have a natural intuition of where snake segments go and where the critical spots are. I most definitely do not. The other puzzles seemed appropriately categorized although the Nurikabe seemed not so easy.
Rules, points, scoring--doesn't really matter. I solve mainly for fun and for the challenge. I do respect those who can fly through these things.
Thank you, authors/constructors. And thanks LMI for setting this up. I do enjoy large, hard puzzles occasionally, and they are hard to find even on the internet. Most puzzles are snacks, these are banquets.
Bob |
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Location: India | Puzzle Marathon 2015 ends tonight
Please note that the Puzzle Marathon ends at 3/16/2015 5:29:59 AM IST | 3/15/2015 11:59:59 PM GMT
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Posts: 1
Location: China | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Fillomino | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Summon | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Battleships | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | |
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| | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Coded Snake | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Scrabble with Loop | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Hidoku | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Perfectly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | |
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Posts: 29
Location: United Kingdom | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Fillomino | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Turning Fences | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Hidoku | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Very skewed | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Fairly Nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | |
This is always one of my favourite contests, so thanks to everyone involved. However, I think I did prefer last year's marathon, overall. This year's puzzles just seemed slightly too difficult- in particular, I found a large jump in difficulty between the easy ones and the medium ones. There was still some nice logic in some of the hard ones though, so I probably would've enjoyed it a lot more without the pressure of the clock! |
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| | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Hidoku | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Fillomino | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Scrabble with Loop | |
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Posts: 35
Location: The Netherlands | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Regional Coded Snake | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Scrabble with Loop | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Hidoku | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Very nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Fair | |
Always my favorite annual contest!!! Many thanks to the authors for the beautifully crafted puzzles!
I found the puzzles on average harder than in previous marathon contexts though, so for average puzzlers it was hard to stay under an hour for any of the medium/hard puzzles. As a result, the final score and ranking was very much determined by the easy puzzles alone. |
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Location: India | ExtensionBased on multiple requests, we are extending this contest by 24 hours. So it now ends at 11:59:59 PM GMT on 16th March.
Timings on submission page shall be updated soon.
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| | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Statue Park | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Scrabble with Loop | | | Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest. | Hidoku | | | How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were? | Fairly balanced | | | What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test? | Fairly Nice | | | What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test? | Bit unfair | |
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Posts: 102
Location: United States | Could someone give some tips on how to start the summon (once the competition is over of course)? I was very lost on that one and basically made no progress on it. |
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WSPC 2017 • Schedule • Participation • Location • WSC • WPC • Contact •Search •Recent
Puzzle Marathon 2015 - LMI March Puzzle Test - 6th to 15th March
