Comments | cyrebjr: I will make a direct apology soon.

cyrebjr

I will make a direct apology soon.

Jun 16, 2007 14:15

I just participated in the Google U.S. Puzzle Championship and boy are my arms tired. Ha! But seriously, folks, I need to apologize to whomever made puzzle 7, Circuit Maze. Here, let me start at the beginning.
A few months ago (March 23, apparently), I was browsing the Google group at Read more... )

puzzle, edited, essay, personal

Comments 2

The against zotmeister December 12 2011, 20:02:54 UTC

Funny that I should find this after all this time! Being in a position where I can see (or think I see - visual distraction being something Mark was admittedly going for in that "puzzle") both sides of this, I feel compelled to respond, even if this is a years-old affair. This is going to be big, so I'll split it up into two comments.

Mark Steere and I have a curious thing in common: we both debuted as constructors for the USPC the same year. Unlike him, I stuck with it :) I've never actually met or contacted Mark, but I certainly knew of him for years... just not as a puzzlesmith. He is a designer of abstract strategy games, including Rootbound [he should NEVER have renamed it], which is arguably a better thing to do with a go board than go. And yes, that last sentence is as great a compliment as could possibly be given to such a person, and it is intended as such.

Which promptly leads me to wonder: what in the name of sanity could have driven him to construct a mazeHere's the thing about puzzle design: What makes puzzles fun ( ... )

The for zotmeister December 12 2011, 21:21:12 UTC

However, I think I know why he chose to be evil: he'd been trained to. He needed to be in order to survive. Let me explain.

I was given a scare in September last year when I discovered that one of most widely distributed puzzles - my Masyu example on Wikipedia - was effectively stolen when someone who had taken it unto themselves to change the graphic format of the puzzle image decided in the process to strip out attribution and announce the resulting image to be in the public domain. Thanks in large part to Mike Selinker (my hero!), this situation was properly resolved, and my puzzle is again being recognized as mine.

I created that puzzle specifically for the purpose of gifting it. The article needed an example, and it's not like they can just grab one from a book somewhere - that'd be a copyright violation. It needed someone willing to copyleft their puzzle. I volunteered. So who would have the audacity to try to steal something that's already a gift? Well, apparently, someone doubly ignorant - the editor that perpetrated ( ... )