Yes a surprising (and pleasing!) final result.
I wasn't feeling very confident beforehand, but did all the previous mazes I could find (Roland's blog is always helpful). Also I found some by Palmer Mebane at http://www.clickmazes.com/noleft/ixnoleft.htm from 2005, when he was still at high school! And a little luck is always appreciated, I got through them all without stumbling much.
For the arrow mazes I had a system where I coloured all the 1-step cells first, then the 2-step cells a different colour, etc. My answer for the larger puzzle was much shorter than what others found, so that saved me some time.
I was worried about the Eschers, but kept trying options until they relented. And the double maze was easier when I started from the exit and worked backwards to link up to the start-options (also did this with the 2x1).
Apparently only 5 of my 13 answers matched Roland's original answer key. And one of those 5 was the Cycle (my favourite), which I was solving logically and so proved it had multiple options, but randomly chose the official solution. So lots of multiple answers it seems, but that is no problem for mazes, especially hard ones!
Yes Neil, at one point I was below you on the table (sorry for raising your hopes
). I made a typo in one answer, and for another one (the rolling block) my answer was so long that the webpage was truncating it back to 50 characters. I noticed it once and resubmitted it before the test end, but thought it was my mistake until I found it had been truncated again.And thank you Roland, this test in particular must have taken a long time to create the contest book for, the mazes were large and complicated.
