Puzzle Jackpot - LMI January Puzzle Test on 8th/9th

[debmohanty]

Logic Masters India announces January Puzzle Test - Puzzle Jackpot

Author : Serkan Yürekli

Puzzle Types : 5 puzzle categories (Skyscraper, Snake, Math Puzzles, Tapa and Word Puzzles), 5 puzzles from each category

Date : 8th and 9th January

Length : 120 minutes (+5 minutes)

IB and Submission Link : http://logicmastersindia.com/lmitests?test=M201101P

Please check the IB for Jackpot scoring system. Hope to see you all participate and enjoy the puzzles.

[ronaldx]

This will be interesting - the more people solve a puzzle, the fewer points it will score.
So... the hard puzzles naturally score more points.

I've often thought this should be the case and I'm curious to see what effect it will have! (here the difference is small so perhaps it will only break ties)

Also some interesting variations at play. Check the instruction sheet.

Thanks for organising and good luck everyone Happy New Year!

[debmohanty]

The test has started!

[dickoon]

Completed it and enjoyed it!

I won't offer any spoilers or strategy reflections, but so far it looks like I will finish fairly close to the bottom - and Mr. McNeill will finish fairly close to the top. Enjoyable, though I could have done without having made a copying error from paper to keyboard in one of my answer submissions. Fehlversuche!

Is there a way to give the puzzles star ratings once your 120+5 minutes has completed, or can they only be entered during the 120+5 minutes of the test itself? (I have tried putting some star ratings in once the 120+5 expired, but just got "Test over".)

[debmohanty]

Is there a way to give the puzzles star ratings once your 120+5 minutes has completed, or can they only be entered during the 120+5 minutes of the test itself? (I have tried putting some star ratings in once the 120+5 expired, but just got "Test over".)

All your ratings are recorded, as you can see from the results page.
Rating works after 120+5 minutes, and in fact we recommend players to rate only after the test gets over for them.
Thanks for participating and feedback.

[PuzzleScot]

Chris, IIRC, the star ratings don't need a submit action to be registered. Simply clicking on a star to indicate the rating is sufficient.

[drsteve]

That was fun - shame about me entering the column followed by the row for Gapless Kakuro. Still wouldn't quite catch that pesky McNeill, but it'd be close...

[PuzzleScot]

I've still got 15+ minutes on the clock, but I'm not allowed to enter answers after 05:30 IST (no indication of what THAT is on the puzzle page!)
I believe they're 5.5 hrs ahead of us, meaning it's 06:00 now. I hope my last few answers were all registered... bummer.

[PuzzleScot]

Yup, seems (

PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER_SHOW PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER: gappy

2143/3214

) and (

PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER_SHOW PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER: sum

13245/52134

) weren't registered. 9'30 still on the clock - pah!
E1 and E2 are missing too!!! Ooh, I'm annoyed. Not the best performance in the world, but half my points are missing.

[Calavera]

I've still got 15+ minutes on the clock, but I'm not allowed to enter answers after 05:30 IST (no indication of what THAT is on the puzzle page!)

Well, on the competition page where the start button is there is also listed at which time the competition ends and what the current time is...

[PuzzleScot]

and what the current time is...

yes, in GMT.

[Calavera]

and what the current time is...

yes, in GMT.

So all you have to do is taking the difference between current time and the end time... Or am I missing something?

[drsteve]

Alan, it looks to me like all four of those puzzles have been registered to you now.

Pretty good turn out for the UK - eight entries plus Ronald who seems to have started and then not done anything.

Couldn't have been closer between Tom and Ulrich at the top - compare the times. Not sure how it makes Uvo 1 and Tom 2 though...

Anyone who hasn't looked at these, I'd highly recommend these. One of the most interesting competitions in a long time.

[motris]

Couldn't have been closer between Tom and Ulrich at the top - compare the times. Not sure how it makes Uvo 1 and Tom 2 though...

It's a quirk of the scoring database that it isn't sorting by time and so sometimes it loads with me first and sometimes Ulrich. I'm not going to celebrate the .0142% difference in times too much, but I wonder if the gap over H. Jo will lead to a switch at 2/3 in the puzzle rankings. Nikola will certainly be coming closer from 4th too.

[dickoon]

It looks like the Jackpot scoring system meant that much more was deducted from the 30-point puzzles, relative to their nominal value, than to the 90-point puzzles. I should probably have predicted this coming in. It would probably have been more profitable for me to spend more time on higher-value puzzles; I managed to crack, though not necessarily enter correctly, all of the 30-point puzzles outside the Snake section. (I have no clue how to get started with Snakes.) Even though I might have done better completing, say, two 60-point puzzles and a 80-point puzzle instead of seven 30-point puzzles, I don't think I would have enjoyed doing so as much.

Enjoyable variations. Thanks very much, LMI, for another very fine test!

[david mcneill]

I see you beat me in the end Steve. I'll try to get you next time. Very enjoyable contest. Disappointed I didn't do better. Struggled greatly with the gapped Kakuro puzzle. Solved it 90% twice, only to find a contradiction in the top left corner, and had to come back to it after the contest had finished.

Also thoroughly enjoyed the word puzzles. Spent a lot of time on these because they were so good. Might have placed better if I had prioritised other puzzles.

David.

[nickdeller]

I'll be having an unofficial go at these at some point in the next few days. Would have entered properly, but I'm still on the way back following a nasty bout of post-Christmas flu, and I'm nowhere near ready for any full-on puzzling yet!

[sknight]

If you figure the major effect of the scoring system was to knock about 5 points off all the puzzles, it definitely got you more points to answer one 90 than a 30 and a 60. In my my unexceptional little corner of the scoreboard, I ended up beating the other people with the same base score because I did it in fewer puzzles, and almost caught somebody with 60 more base points. Mind you, its still worth doing something like the 30-point crisscross, since its really easy and quick (not that I noticed that during the test...).

It's a tribute to the ingenuity of Serkan Yurekli that one of the most interesting and beautiful puzzles was a "vanilla" kakuro. Part of that was because a few key totals were deliberately omitted, making a much tighter solving path than a lot of kakuros. It also was a relatively small puzzle, which means that if you could get past the key break-ins, it came together pretty quickly for a 90-pointer.

Orbits and Scrabble were pretty easy 90-pointers as well. I have to wonder how many people wiped out on the word-find because they were suckered into such things as filling in WOME_ as women -- it was definitely a sneakier version of that format than the usual USPC ones.

Time for me to go back and try the Snake puzzles, which I blew off during the test. Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes.

[rodders]

My strategy was to concentrate on the 90 point puzzles, although this dramatically backfired when I spent the majority of the time not solving them successfully!

Very enjoyable set of puzzles despite the disappointing result.

[drsteve]

I see you beat me in the end Steve. I'll try to get you next time. Very enjoyable contest. Disappointed I didn't do better. Struggled greatly with the gapped Kakuro puzzle. Solved it 90% twice, only to find a contradiction in the top left corner, and had to come back to it after the contest had finished.

Also thoroughly enjoyed the word puzzles. Spent a lot of time on these because they were so good. Might have placed better if I had prioritised other puzzles.

David.

Luckily they gave me the points for the Gapped Kakuro when I entered them in the wrong order.

Luckily I don't think I wasted too much time - quickly established Skyscrapers was going to be difficult, so skipped that. Skipped the Domino one as well, but doing it later, it was quicker than 13 minutes for me. David, I noticed you missed the Snakes out entirely, presumably due to the low points - not convinced that Egg was the easiest, and the normal one wasn't trivial, but these all came out (First Seen was really easy). Section C, generally approached with trepidation as I'm almost as rubbish/slow at Kakuro as I am at Sudoku, but I enjoy the Gapped examples - I helped Liane prepare the example for the 24 Hr and have done the actual 24 Hr one as well, so i did that and the Summer. Subsequently did Orbits in less than 10 minutes - again, a 90 pointer that I could have got, maybe. Can't stand Trid, so for only 60 points, it really wasn't worth it. Got the Tapas apart from Easy as - seen these before and never quite clicked with them. The Wordsearch threw me, as I missed the second WOMEN placement. Overall, this was a fantastic competition - impeccably designed. Anyone who hasn't done it yet, do it!

[yureklis]

Orbits and Scrabble were pretty easy 90-pointers as well. I have to wonder how many people wiped out on the word-find because they were suckered into such things as filling in WOME_ as women -- it was definitely a sneakier version of that format than the usual USPC ones.

Word search had many tricks like WOMEN, this design was much more fun (at least for me) This puzzle type has always been designed that the first seen possibility was always true. The point was to cause trouble to solvers I think I succeeded, sorry for the mess.

Time for me to go back and try the Snake puzzles, which I blew off during the test. Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes.

I like snake puzzles because they are easy to prepare with a lot of different techniques. Recently I read the comments on my Snake Variations contest in this forum, there was a post about Dotted Snake puzzle explaining the solving steps in detail. Those steps were exactly what I used during making the puzzle. So it is really fun to prepare snake puzzles, since one can lead to the solution step by step.

[motris]

I for one really appreciated your tricks on the word search. I think I spotted ~4 false placements, but each was resolvable by finding the second possible placement when a contradiction popped up.

Your removal of extra clues, and a good 8x8 grid, similarly turned the classic Kakuro into a pretty interesting puzzle. So as much as some of the variations were great puzzles, your extra care on the classics to do things new or different was certainly very much appreciated by me!

[drsteve]

Your removal of extra clues, and a good 8x8 grid, similarly turned the classic Kakuro into a pretty interesting puzzle.

I'd say that this was possibly the first Kakuro ever that I actually enjoyed solving - it was a beautiful puzzle.

[yureklis]

I for one really appreciated your tricks on the word search. I think I spotted ~4 false placements, but each was resolvable by finding the second possible placement when a contradiction popped up.

I was not so good with word puzzles and since I had trouble solving them, I was not preparing any as well. I wanted to prepare some for WPC Poland, I knew that there wouldn't be much word puzzles. But I had to solve some first, in order to prepare them well. So I searched through USPC and picked some types. After solving those it was easier for me, I got the main logic in those puzzles. USPC word puzzles usually ask for the unused words for answer entry, so I had to make sure the puzzles would not be cracked until the end. This is the reason for tricks like WOMEN. For example, Jumping Crossword had a DELL/HELL contradiction at the end, and some solvers went for it.

Your removal of extra clues, and a good 8x8 grid, similarly turned the classic Kakuro into a pretty interesting puzzle. So as much as some of the variations were great puzzles, your extra care on the classics to do things new or different was certainly very much appreciated by me!

I struggled a lot for Kakuro. At first it wasn't meant to be that way, but when I saw the way it is going, I changed the main theme and it turned out to be a different Kakuro than usual.

It is fun, still learning to make puzzles

[PuzzleScot]

Fantastic job as ever Serkan!