Current mood:	cautiously optimistic
Entry tags:	puzzles

I Get Along
Today, as has been commented on at...oh hell, I'm not going to link to them all, just click on "Friends"...the US Puzzle Championship took place.  2.5 hours of delightful puzzling action, with often less than desirable results.  The first year -- I took the test in the Disneyland Hotel business center, after shoveling down a breakfast that was ordered when I thought there were 80 minutes before gametime, when in fact there were only 20.  I finished 73rd or so.

Last year: ready to "make my mark", I summarily scored fewer points than during the first ridiculous adventure...yet my ranking went up.  28th or so.

This year I had absolutely no excuse not to outperform previous efforts, given the amount of time I've spent on improving my speed, cutting down on errors, and taking amphetamines.  JUST KIDDING.

Here's a link to the test page.  Print the test out -- you won't regret it.  Unless you try that Triangles one, it seems.  Me, I have no regrets!  Wink wink nudge nudge.

Ok, maybe one: I thought I had gotten the printer to actually print things in the right order, but no, it instead gave me the final page first, then went through the pdf, concluding with the front page, the recommended starting point for test-takers.  Instead of the familiarity of Battleships and Sudoku, I took on KakurOh first.  Slowly.  Kakuro and me go way back, but not with the cool new big boxes.  This, plus my insistence on repeating "This is so awesome!", made this a lot longer than, say, last year's Kakuro variation.  But hey!  Barring silly transpositions and submission errors (a caveat I won't repeat for the 14 or so puzzles I submitted but haven't confirmed), I got it!

Battleships was next, then Sudoku.  There's been some chatter on Thomas' LJ about this being a non-standard Battleships or something...really?  I thought it was incredibly straightforward.  The Sudoku, which I'd mentally begun solving a bit while waiting for the second page to spit out of the printer, went at a reasonable pace.

I believe next was Arrow Ring, a nifty variation of which I've done not nearly enough; I guess there are whole sections of Japanese books devoted to this style.  The practice would have been useful, as I'd temporarily forgotten about the forced nature of the path through narrow passageways near the walls (here, the whole left edge of the grid).  It was an unsatisfying solve, and a likely candidate for mistaken entry.

I figured, eh, might as well try to run down the five points from the Sum Figure, and I got 'em.  I didn't pay enough attention to its 0-9 nature, but once I noticed that, it was smooth sailing: 30, then 21...wow, there go seven of the ten digits.

Hey, it's a STD!  SKIP!

Black Pearl, the Masyu knockoff on the test, was...broken.  Looks like I connected the two middle 1's sloppily.  Whoops!

Masyu, the Masyu real-deal, seemed easy enough.  Last year's had a pretty fancy work-in, and this one...I wouldn't say that was the case here.  Or maybe I'm better after having done 60-some of these puzzles on Nikoli.

Nebijok, the word search thing, comes next.  No, no it doesn't.  I got NOWHERE about 45 seconds into it, and that was enough for me.  My usual method for doing these types of puzzles is to try and find the big words, which hopefully will reveal some piece of the missing section.  Not today.  I did solve it afterwards, and maybe it wasn't so bad...although I feel half-icky writing in "this is too good not to be true!" letters.  It'd be damn cruel for the "SUSI" coming down the grid not to, you know, be actually where the corresponding word in the list appears to go, no?

Number Blocks was a worthy puzzle, and eventually came together (after some worry) at a worthy pace.  The one on the left was easier for me than the one on the right.  I believe this is because 1*4*8 is 32 and not, in fact, 16.  This error, despite spending at least 45 minutes a day practicing my times-tables...

Kuromasu, the Corral knockoff on the test, was...broken.  Looks like I assumed something with the 5 and 6/11 in the lower right that I shouldn't have.  Whoops!

Murder Number 6, the "Killer Latin Square" on the test, wasn't all that pesky.  I did write a 6 once, tho.

Corral, the Corral real-deal, was...broken!  I'd done a bunch of these last summer, and refreshed myself a bit today...but not enough to remember the silly, deconstructive rules that I applied in lieu of viewing this like a lasso roping in black cells here and there.  Namely, all the black cells have to find their way to the edge, and not get boxed in by dotted cells, as I did in the middle of the puzzle.  Whoops!

Tilted Weights -- bring it!  Ok...now dial it back a notch.  Please.  I made the same notes that everyone else seems to have made, regarding the two weights all the way to the right.  I, however, thought it would be best to consider the combinations there starting with the largest (4,9), not the smallest (1,3).  Hence, when my spotty mental trial-and-error was employed for the other seven blocks, I figured something was wrong...and I had no idea what it was.  Thankfully, it didn't stay that way.

Distances looked too much like Suspects or that Pedestal thing or whatever...I didn't think I'd want to touch it at all during the test.  But, eh, what the heck?  Turns out this was my favorite new style...in a really long time.  Even if it is kinda Eminent Domain-y, it's still new to me!

I really liked this puzzle!  How much did I like it?  So much that I'm devoting two paragraphs to it.  Very fun!  I didn't check my answer, but I did recall the "Latin Square" angle of the solution, which gives me lukewarm fuzzies.

Dot Triangles -- HAH!  I didn't even have much of a go at this one after time was up.

Crisscross Pairs...I thought I'd kick this one around a little to see what happened.  Like all rookie n00bs, I started in the upper-left, and figured I'd try all candidates...that didn't start with A.  If it became a hassle...well, I'd skip it.  Then...hmm, these two work, and then these others and...oh drat, that doesn't fit.  Or does it?  I got all the way to the last word, realized that none of the remaining four words would fit in that last vertical slot, and then noticed that using a different one of the pairs for the second-to-last placement made things work.  And this answer has been confirmed!  My minimum possible score now is...-60!

Sheep in Fences...what's going on here?  Not with the puzzle rules or anything, but...I actually got this one without too many tufts of hair falling or being pulled out.  The lower-left...Fences rules get you a bunch of lines anyhow, and then the sheep hanging out there gives you a handful of lines.  In some sense, I guess slumming it at Kwontomloop, with their computer-generated beastly puzzles (replete with all sorts of ugly combinations in lieu of the "elegance" of hand-placed puzzles), has its advantages.  The upper-right and lower-left got filled in quickly.  The upper-left?  Ok, not so much.  To be fair, I certainly breathed easier when everything seemed to check out (particularly after my "forced logic" chain in the upper-left led to an immediate contradiction), so I respect the difficulty here.  I guess the new wrinkle fell within my intuitive feel...despite my using the shadings on KL to (sneakily!) indicate where I was making a guess and not for an inside/outside purpose.

SuDON'Tku...what could possibly go wrong here?  Oh, right, I could eff it up.  And oh, I certainly did.  Time to get cracking on the spare copy of puzzles!

Err, wait...there's still Ampers& Crisscross.  Oh, I keed!

Black Pearl, take two, went about as quickly as the first one, with time saved by not screwing it up royally in the middle.  I kinda dig this style, but I've always been a Masyu fan.

Kuromasu...I've always been a Corral fan too; I guess Corral hasn't always been a fan of mine, but that's another story.  Anyhow, yeah, I dig it.  Force the stuff around the 2...put dots everywhere the black won't go...noooo, not again!  My upper-left 7 "saw" 6 total cells, despite everything else being "correct".  Or, errr...wait, no, that 14 only "sees" 13.  Ok, problem solved...I think.  If I screwed up one of the puzzles on the page (as opposed to a final digit transposition or a submission error), this is the one.

Corral came along rather nicely too.  The big black blob in the middle...wow, I got a kick out of filling in "Corral-restricted" cells there -- the black cells "outside the loop" that don't necessarily restrict how many cells can be seen from a numbered cell.  Yeah, that makes sense.  Anyhow, I really like this style, and I think someone should write a book with a couple hundred Corral puzzles.  Then give it to me, gratis.  Btw, to convince myself of it's Corral-y nature, I actually lassoed all the black cells upon completion.

Ok, SuDON'Tku must die!  Well, it's either that puzzle or me.  This town ain't big enough for the both of us.

Also not big enough: the frickin' 8 in the last column, which I somehow didn't see, which led to me putting "68" as the two candidate numbers for R1C3 and R2C1.  Which led to me...getting stuck, something fierce.  Trial-and-error time!  Ok, that got me a 2.  Let's look at it for another five fruitless minutes.  Done!  No, not with the puzzles...I mean the fruitlessness.  Then...oh, for pete's sake...ohhh, arrrrrrgh.

At this point I'm through sixteen puzzles, and dropped them into the answer submission thing...or did I??  I didn't get an email confirmation or anything, although I did see the "Answers received -- you can resubmit them -- we'll only take your final submission -- yada yada" screen.  Or did I??  Wait, yes, yes I did.

Now I've got five minutes left...might as well try to score with the STD.  I found six of them, I believe, doing it far, far too much like a "Hocus Focus" and not all methodical-like (with a square-by-square check).  Six points are still better than none...and hey, even if one of them is wrong, it's still a push, no?  I could have used the extra five minutes from SuDON'Tku, tho...

By my count: a maximum of 281.  I will grit my teeth and compare my "solutions" to the actual ones one of these days...probably early next week.  Somehow, you know, by not looking right now, this'll make mistakes less likely.

By my count: 16 great, STD-free puzzles!  I'd probably still write one of these long-winded rundowns even if the test were comprised of tripe, but that's never been the case, certainly not this year.  I don't know if I'll ever get as many familiar puzzles as there were this year, but then again -- I'm no expert at crisscross puzzles, and there were two of those on here, including the most valuable one.

Even the STD puzzle was cool.  I like mice.  After not even attempting that type last year, I'm glad to get positive, or at least non-negative, results from a visual puzzle.

I seem to recall being flummoxed by the Corral on last year's test, and vowing to get better at those by this time this year (i.e. about 16 hours ago).  I went and got the Tuller & Rios Mensa puzzle book, did the Corral puzzles in there, and...mostly forgot everything over the last eleven months.  But yeah, I think I'm a more well-rounded solver now, and maybe will devote some semblance of time over the next few months to crisscross puzzles, or maybe even those word search-y things.

And spend some time on STD puzzles too?  Oh, don't be silly.