WPC Day 1
Mostly fun puzzles, although all rounds seemed to have a "new type" or an optimizer, not a puzzle, that stymied me from finishing. Getting 90% done in 2/3 of the time, and 5% done in the last 1/3 was the story of the day. Still, I've been checking things and scoring ok so about where I want to be. After 2 rounds, in third behind Peter Hudak and Ulrich Voigt.
Summary of the day:
Part 1 - Team - this round involved wrapping a set of green paper according to somewhat standard snake rules onto a grid that turned out to be a 4x4x4 cube sitting in the middle of an 8x8 platform. Some cells were marked and had to be avoided. It was fun to work with, but I never got the feeling we were really optimizing more than solving a corner/quarter and combining progress. There was a trick move not in the booklet (but apparently in the instruction session where I don't really pay attention) that we could have used to get an even better score but oh well.
Part 2 - Individual - Sprint - with a Saint Nick theme given his connection to Antalya - 16 puzzles, 20 minutes, and 13-14 of them were legitimately sprint puzzles. I did them with 15 minutes; two - an optimizer based on "How many solutions" a broken battleships puzzle had - seemed to take too long and also had a 5 point penalty leading to a skip. I stared at the OpHoop for too long and the combination of bad math skills under little sleep led to no more progress. So, at 20 minutes, 14 puzzles done (although 1 had an error).
Part 3 - Individual - Classics - a WPC should have a classics round with just classics puzzles. About 3 of each type for the standards would be fine. Brazil was the last host to do this perfectly and the Hungarians were reasonable about it too in '05. New designs or weird designs should be elsewhere. There were 2-3 suspects here. I took much longer than the score allowed on a german? slitherlink variant I call gessundheit. I got through the Hex Slitherlink but I'd argue the classics form of a slitherlink should be neither a variant, nor on a non-standard grid. I apparently forgot how to solve Black and White puzzles (Ying-Yang) which slowed me up, and almost got the harder magnets at the end but posted another 3rd-5th place score. Getting a lot of these is how to make the finals.
Part 4 - Individual - Optimizers - I like the concept of optimizers having their own round. So this round was fine. Having pseudo-optimizers like the "how many solutions" in the sprint, or a numerical maximization problem in the next round, should be removed from puzzle rounds and kept in this kind of round. The three challenges here went fine for me - pretty solid scores on all three but none perfectly maximal. One was a strict math puzzle which I misread the scoring slightly but I got the maximum of 6 of the 8 products formed. Then a Boggle-like puzzle involving placing letters to spell PEACE and EARTH which lead to a lot of P's on top of a couple EARTHs. Also, a path puzzle with either ANTALYA or ANATOLIA entries to draw the longest path.
Lunch - the restaurant here is phenomenal as already mentioned with tons of dessert choices to go with many meal choices, grill, etc. However, there is now a great overabundance of melon art which made its first WPC/WSC in Prague but here is just apparently a thing the hotel does every day with 6 carved melons of people or nature or quotes everyday.
Part 5 - Innovative - another 90 minute round where the non-classics should be - although here another different slitherlink on octagons was used. So, my one puzzle type that the Turks used was Diagramless Kakuro. While I've only written the one, I have a kind of mental synergy with the constructor of these and grasped the essential symmetry likely at play with little work and blazed through those puzzles. I blazed through all but 4 of them actually. Then the tweaky - try and try until you get them - puzzles were there. The harder of a pair that involved drawing multiple lines in a circle to split groups of numbers into common sums was one offender. With a couple choices of sum and tricky line placements, it took me a lot of time. A rectangle hanging puzzle had me stuck for awhile too - should have planned better what rectangles/squares could exist so I wasn't inventing a wheel/gimmick while solving the puzzle for the first time. Then those math optimizers again; ugh. I don't do math well when very tired and certainly only got the first of these. So, 45 minutes and 3 more pushed through but that's not what half the round time after ~15+ others solved in the first 45 should be like.
Part 6 - Screen Test 1 Matches - two screen tests this year. This was clearly the hardest for me. Puzzles involved identifying a match/two matches to add/subtract/move to make an equation that was false into one that was true. You either explored the right thought space or didn't before time was up. I might have barely gotten over half.
Part 7 - Last individual test of the day and the highest variance round left with a 140 point puzzle that could easily be 0 with errors. It involved 4 sheets of paper with battleships grids with holes in the layers that would see info (ships/numbers) below. Figuring out how to stack them, and then solving the puzzles, was the challenge. A lower grid might reveal a square shape in this spot, but that doesn't mean the higher grid uses the same ship below, just the same square shape. My default battleship notation of shading in used cells lost the necessary shape information which confused me. Still, I finished the puzzle with 3 minutes left just out of individual bonus unless there were errors. Assuming I'm clean (I checked all 4 layers I'm pretty sure), I made my goal of not repeating last years cards round and losing hundreds of points to a lot of other solvers.
Part 8 - Team - Weakest Link - so, Weakest Link rounds fail for many reasons, including too hard entry puzzles. The biggest issue though is that it is impossible to predict the timing of these rounds. I'd prefer a "we'll run extra time until 5 teams finish" kind of plan, particularly for the last round of the day, as it is a failure if no team finished this round in my opinion. So, as the entry puzzles were 4 crypted kakuro variations that I solved fastest. Another team was already at the desk but they'd left after 10 minutes to just work on it together. It was an ORu Kakuro, which can be solvable without extra help but in this case was maybe closer to a busted version of my Siamese Twins Kakuro where the options are really close in a lot of spots. Each new team member would get a sheet giving certain clues in particular places. After 8 minutes on the puzzle, and many others coming to other desks, I was 20-30% done in various parts but otherwise stuck. Roger was next to the table and we added his clues and solved forward, catching a slight error I'd made and tweaking to fix it. Zack arrived thereafter but time was running out. When Wei-Hwa arrived with 3 minutes left in the round, to give us just a single clue of a 4 (which was valuable, but also revealed the lower-left was just directly solvable), we got where we could but were still a couple minutes short of finishing. No team did. So, run the round for 60 minutes and we finish, possibly the Germans, Japanese, or others, and teams would gauge the round as more of a success. So, a sour taste in our mouths as we could not get it worked out in time, but we should gain some by just getting a whole team to the desk. Given tomorrow's last round has this +15 minute idea, I wish there was one today as well.
Dinner, and then an evening activity of Karala puzzles (the Turkish magazine for Paint-by-Numbers). I decided (unwisely?) to compete at a type I rarely solve. After a 15x15 and 20x20, I was one of 8 finalists to make a playoff. I eliminated my first rival Pal from Hungary but was soundly crushed by Hideaki Jo in the semifinals. Michael Ley pulled a mini-upset in my mind to win over Hideaki in the finals. An interesting non-official activity, and it had a simple trophy too. Tomorrow's activity is a Sudoku Cup and maybe I can win a sudoku tournament again for the first time in a long while. The rounds beforehand will be rough, although I'm eyeing the OAPC round, where I've already proven I can get in a good groove, as my big ground-gainer. The "Instructionless" is more frightening - is "Solutionless" a better name? - but we'll see.
Summary of the day:
Part 1 - Team - this round involved wrapping a set of green paper according to somewhat standard snake rules onto a grid that turned out to be a 4x4x4 cube sitting in the middle of an 8x8 platform. Some cells were marked and had to be avoided. It was fun to work with, but I never got the feeling we were really optimizing more than solving a corner/quarter and combining progress. There was a trick move not in the booklet (but apparently in the instruction session where I don't really pay attention) that we could have used to get an even better score but oh well.
Part 2 - Individual - Sprint - with a Saint Nick theme given his connection to Antalya - 16 puzzles, 20 minutes, and 13-14 of them were legitimately sprint puzzles. I did them with 15 minutes; two - an optimizer based on "How many solutions" a broken battleships puzzle had - seemed to take too long and also had a 5 point penalty leading to a skip. I stared at the OpHoop for too long and the combination of bad math skills under little sleep led to no more progress. So, at 20 minutes, 14 puzzles done (although 1 had an error).
Part 3 - Individual - Classics - a WPC should have a classics round with just classics puzzles. About 3 of each type for the standards would be fine. Brazil was the last host to do this perfectly and the Hungarians were reasonable about it too in '05. New designs or weird designs should be elsewhere. There were 2-3 suspects here. I took much longer than the score allowed on a german? slitherlink variant I call gessundheit. I got through the Hex Slitherlink but I'd argue the classics form of a slitherlink should be neither a variant, nor on a non-standard grid. I apparently forgot how to solve Black and White puzzles (Ying-Yang) which slowed me up, and almost got the harder magnets at the end but posted another 3rd-5th place score. Getting a lot of these is how to make the finals.
Part 4 - Individual - Optimizers - I like the concept of optimizers having their own round. So this round was fine. Having pseudo-optimizers like the "how many solutions" in the sprint, or a numerical maximization problem in the next round, should be removed from puzzle rounds and kept in this kind of round. The three challenges here went fine for me - pretty solid scores on all three but none perfectly maximal. One was a strict math puzzle which I misread the scoring slightly but I got the maximum of 6 of the 8 products formed. Then a Boggle-like puzzle involving placing letters to spell PEACE and EARTH which lead to a lot of P's on top of a couple EARTHs. Also, a path puzzle with either ANTALYA or ANATOLIA entries to draw the longest path.
Lunch - the restaurant here is phenomenal as already mentioned with tons of dessert choices to go with many meal choices, grill, etc. However, there is now a great overabundance of melon art which made its first WPC/WSC in Prague but here is just apparently a thing the hotel does every day with 6 carved melons of people or nature or quotes everyday.
Part 5 - Innovative - another 90 minute round where the non-classics should be - although here another different slitherlink on octagons was used. So, my one puzzle type that the Turks used was Diagramless Kakuro. While I've only written the one, I have a kind of mental synergy with the constructor of these and grasped the essential symmetry likely at play with little work and blazed through those puzzles. I blazed through all but 4 of them actually. Then the tweaky - try and try until you get them - puzzles were there. The harder of a pair that involved drawing multiple lines in a circle to split groups of numbers into common sums was one offender. With a couple choices of sum and tricky line placements, it took me a lot of time. A rectangle hanging puzzle had me stuck for awhile too - should have planned better what rectangles/squares could exist so I wasn't inventing a wheel/gimmick while solving the puzzle for the first time. Then those math optimizers again; ugh. I don't do math well when very tired and certainly only got the first of these. So, 45 minutes and 3 more pushed through but that's not what half the round time after ~15+ others solved in the first 45 should be like.
Part 6 - Screen Test 1 Matches - two screen tests this year. This was clearly the hardest for me. Puzzles involved identifying a match/two matches to add/subtract/move to make an equation that was false into one that was true. You either explored the right thought space or didn't before time was up. I might have barely gotten over half.
Part 7 - Last individual test of the day and the highest variance round left with a 140 point puzzle that could easily be 0 with errors. It involved 4 sheets of paper with battleships grids with holes in the layers that would see info (ships/numbers) below. Figuring out how to stack them, and then solving the puzzles, was the challenge. A lower grid might reveal a square shape in this spot, but that doesn't mean the higher grid uses the same ship below, just the same square shape. My default battleship notation of shading in used cells lost the necessary shape information which confused me. Still, I finished the puzzle with 3 minutes left just out of individual bonus unless there were errors. Assuming I'm clean (I checked all 4 layers I'm pretty sure), I made my goal of not repeating last years cards round and losing hundreds of points to a lot of other solvers.
Part 8 - Team - Weakest Link - so, Weakest Link rounds fail for many reasons, including too hard entry puzzles. The biggest issue though is that it is impossible to predict the timing of these rounds. I'd prefer a "we'll run extra time until 5 teams finish" kind of plan, particularly for the last round of the day, as it is a failure if no team finished this round in my opinion. So, as the entry puzzles were 4 crypted kakuro variations that I solved fastest. Another team was already at the desk but they'd left after 10 minutes to just work on it together. It was an ORu Kakuro, which can be solvable without extra help but in this case was maybe closer to a busted version of my Siamese Twins Kakuro where the options are really close in a lot of spots. Each new team member would get a sheet giving certain clues in particular places. After 8 minutes on the puzzle, and many others coming to other desks, I was 20-30% done in various parts but otherwise stuck. Roger was next to the table and we added his clues and solved forward, catching a slight error I'd made and tweaking to fix it. Zack arrived thereafter but time was running out. When Wei-Hwa arrived with 3 minutes left in the round, to give us just a single clue of a 4 (which was valuable, but also revealed the lower-left was just directly solvable), we got where we could but were still a couple minutes short of finishing. No team did. So, run the round for 60 minutes and we finish, possibly the Germans, Japanese, or others, and teams would gauge the round as more of a success. So, a sour taste in our mouths as we could not get it worked out in time, but we should gain some by just getting a whole team to the desk. Given tomorrow's last round has this +15 minute idea, I wish there was one today as well.
Dinner, and then an evening activity of Karala puzzles (the Turkish magazine for Paint-by-Numbers). I decided (unwisely?) to compete at a type I rarely solve. After a 15x15 and 20x20, I was one of 8 finalists to make a playoff. I eliminated my first rival Pal from Hungary but was soundly crushed by Hideaki Jo in the semifinals. Michael Ley pulled a mini-upset in my mind to win over Hideaki in the finals. An interesting non-official activity, and it had a simple trophy too. Tomorrow's activity is a Sudoku Cup and maybe I can win a sudoku tournament again for the first time in a long while. The rounds beforehand will be rough, although I'm eyeing the OAPC round, where I've already proven I can get in a good groove, as my big ground-gainer. The "Instructionless" is more frightening - is "Solutionless" a better name? - but we'll see.