auroux - 2022-02-20 1:36 AM

Count me among the grumpy dinosaurs if you wish, but I'll sit out this event. Penpa is fairly good for what it is, but it's still very far from solving on paper from a user experience perspective. It probably took me a while to learn when I was a little kid, but by now I'm quite adept at using paper and pencil, and that is a very very high bar for any kind of user interface to compete against (largely because of another equally amazing piece of technology: the eraser). Penpa has a learning curve, not an unreasonably steep one from what I can tell, but for me it just kills the enjoyment of the puzzle to not be able to just draw harder/lighter lines by pressing harder/less hard on my screen, and quickly erase the lighter lines. (I'm sure there are features to do something equivalent, but they require navigating a user interface.)

Also, on the second practice puzzle, Penpa let me put stuff into the grayed area and it wasn't clear (until I counted and convinced myself it couldn't be) whether that region was meant to be part of the puzzle or not. (I guess that's why there are practice puzzles at the start, so people who will be doing this seriously can figure out how to live with Penpa.)

Puzzle_Maestro - 2022-02-20 12:03 AM

The 'daily contests' link (under 'more contests') appears to redirect to an unrelated site.

prasanna16391 - 2022-02-19 1:15 PMThe second part, you aren't the first one, and I will again direct you and others to my introduction post as well as the "About" link at the top of the contest page where we have divulged as many details about the rules, visual clarifications, penpa clarifications, etc. as we can. At some point I think its fair for us to expect that people will read the information we are putting out, or at least, expect surprises if not.

auroux - 2022-02-20 7:18 AM

Ah. The problem is that I had honestly NOT noticed the existence of an "About" link or its significance, either on the contest page or in your introduction post (which I must admit I read too quickly). In general, I find the new visual identity of LMI's website a bit difficult to get used to in terms of where to find information. In particular, the dark green navigation bar at the very top of the LMI page had previously almost always been used only for navigation through the site, not to locate important information related to the specific contest one is about to attempt, and it honestly did not occur to me that this might contain a link I should follow before accessing the puzzles. "About" in a menu that normally contains the main LMI navigation bar is something I might have expected to point to general information about LMI. It used to be that all the information that might be needed live during a contest was in the middle of the page _PLUS_ on the IB/PB, so it takes a bit of adjustment to get used to new possibilities about where the information might be found.

Thanks for a great contest with great puzzles. This time, I looked a bit more into the scoring system. First, I could not find any description how it works.
If we start at the "Leaderboards" page, there is a column "B" in the table with my personal points.
If I look at the "Statistics" page, there are various values I don't understand. I can't find the values in the "50th player" and "100th player" column anywhere else, especially not in the detailed ranking of the corresponding puzzle. (Also the marking HH:MM for these columns is probably wrong.).

With that sum being 1600, it's save to assume that the main contributor to the ranking (beside solving all puzzles) are the "Type A" points. The contest started with 350 puzzlers and as expected, there is a slow decline. There were a stable 200-250 successful solvers per puzzle. Of these, up to 60% got nothing. That's just not a good idea in my opinion. Of course it doesn't matter if you can constantly get Top100 results, but a lot of people (even experienced puzzlers) can not. So for all but the maybe 50 people who can constantly get Top100 results, the ranking correlates very badly with the performance.