| SUMS 2009 puzzle details |
[Sep. 5th, 2009|07:53 am] |
OK, it appears to be over now, as far as prizes are concerned. 6 teams (4 with Australian members) have solved all the scoring puzzles, and with remaining puzzles worth at most 4 points each, the best any of the other teams can do is tie the 3rd & 4th place Australian teams, which would leave that team 5th on tiebreaker by last solve time.
Although I will spoil some things below, a lot of it is already pretty well spoiled by the official hints.
( My comments on the puzzles, some of them spoily )
|
|
|
| SUMS 2009 Puzzle Hunt |
[Sep. 4th, 2009|09:19 pm] |
Woot! Together with the same group I've been solving a lot of these hunts with, we have won the inaugural Sydney University Mathematics Society Puzzle Hunt. The team is no slouch, pretty much identical to our winning MUMS team earlier in the year, but with the addition of Corey Plover (who we lost to puzzle construction for MUMS after it being due to him that we started doing Australian events in the first place). We're also a portion of the team that won the MIT Mystery Hunt this year.
As of the release of hints at noon Saturday Sydney time (10 PM Friday US eastern time) nobody else can pass our score of 99 points, and only Tweleve Pack can tie us. We solved all of the puzzles within 5 hours of their release except Poetry Makes Character Sore, which ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dalryaug figured out in the 47th hour, and the non-scoring meta, which we got just shortly after solving Poetry.
I am not going to go into great detail about the puzzles now, as some teams are still competing for the remaining prize positions, but I will say there were some very nice puzzles and a couple clunkers. I think I enjoyed this hunt more than any of the MUMS or CISRA hunts of the last few years. One of my teammates described one of the puzzles as the one he wishes he had written for Mystery Hunt 2010. I will post details about the puzzles when the hunt is over, or at least after the prize rankings are all set.
So now we can solve the Labor Day Extravaganza without worrying about SUMS. (There's the Harvard hunt which starts an hour later, but I am personally skipping that one. A man can only do so many puzzles.)
|
|
|
| May, a month of puzzles |
[May. 2nd, 2009|07:30 pm] |
Every month is a month of puzzles with me, but here's some puzzle news:- My team, plugh, finished up the CISRA puzzles last night, solving the last one 2 days after the next-to-last one to finish 4th in the non-prize-eligible division.
- Turkzeka started today. The first puzzle is still available at full value if you'd like to join.
- Logic Masters, the German puzzle championship, is next Saturday.
- The Washington Post hunt is Sunday, May 17th. I'm not planning to attend.
- And for next month, the USPC is June 20th.
|
|
|
| Woot! |
[Apr. 4th, 2009|01:25 pm] |
Mystery Hunt progress slowed over the past week because a bunch of us were doing the MUMS puzzles, but we won! We lost our original Melbourne contact Corey to puzzle design, but sin_vraal had a friend in Melbourne who we called on to go find the mystic bananas when we figured out last night where they were.
I'll be at the Boston crossword tournament tomorrow as a noncompetitor. Hope to see many of you there!
And of course I am spending time solving RPO's annual presents in the April Enigma.
|
|
|
| More Stuff Joe's Doing |
[Mar. 7th, 2009|06:28 pm] |
In my recent post I omitted one of my February activities. Cliff Johnson has been working on The Fool and His Money, the sequel to The Fool's Errand, for quite a long time, and he has finally delivered a free teaser with a few of the puzzles. Recommended for old-school wordplay and puzzle-game fans. I solved the puzzles in the teaser.
In addition to the one I wrote up here, I have been solving the Kenken varieties posted by motris . (But since they are more normal and able to be presented in text solutions, I have been writing them in white-on-white comments.)
There was also the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt last weekend, and I have been working on some of the puzzles from it.
|
|
|
| December in Puzzles |
[Dec. 2nd, 2008|10:25 pm] |
What am I doing this month?- Getting ready for Mystery Hunt. Choosing a team name. Other prep.
- The NPL's Enigma, as always.
- Solving P&A. I lack only a few answers for the meta now, a combination of almost-finished puzzles (like Nightmare Cadillac) and barely started ones (like Nine Cards), but I haven't figured out how to fill in the meta.
- Solving random cryptics from Kevin Wald. Not only did he give out a new Thanksgiving one, but Corey Plover is trying to solve all the old ones posted here, and consults me for help finishing the hard clues.
- Math Magic, as always. I'm not greatly interested in writing lots of solutions for this month's puzzle, but I am trying to find some interesting ones.
- There is a Forsmarts puzzle competition this Saturday. If I don't get absorbed into helping my Kingdom of Loathing clan do a coat run, I will probably try to compete on the puzzles, though certain other people are competing who will no doubt finish faster. Otherwise, I'll just do them at a leisurely pace later. (They also have a sudoku event during the Mystery Hunt which I will not be able to compete in, but may look at afterward.)
- Via mathpuzzle.com I've found an interesting tiling puzzle. This will probably be what I spend the most time on this month. I've already made my cardboard set of tiles using the method of printing out the set of tiles, gluing it to cardboard, and cutting it out with a sharp knife, and I've developed a simple program to draw solutions in SVG. It's meant to run all through 2009, but I don't expect it to take anywhere near that long.
- Wiseoz continues to run a variety of different types of competitions. I won 6 of 9 rounds in the sequel to the Fried Logic event that got me started over there, yielding $30 in Charis Games gift codes. These will probably be spent buying Blokus and Blokus Trigon.
|
|
|
| October puzzles |
[Oct. 1st, 2008|08:34 pm] |
Recently,![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) puzzlinks posted about puzzles on wiseoz.com. They have several contests running with small prizes (or sometimes just points on their site that can in theory be exchanged for stuff from their store if you get enough of them) for solving various puzzles. The one puzzlinks was posting about had a Cidouri puzzle live and waiting to be solved, and I solved it to win a copy of Modern Classic Puzzles by Peter Grabarchuk. I'll have another post some time to review the book. I also won on another puzzle that just gave some points.
I've been looking at the October Enigma. Two puzzles I wrote are in it. Sorry for the poor phonetics in one puzzle, but it is quite solvable.
MathMagic's October puzzle just went up in the last hour. I felt I made a good contribution to the September puzzle, finding a 2-symbiotic pair of shapes, some infinite sets, and best known symbiotic tilings for several pairs. (This will make more sense if you go look at that puzzle.)
Ponder This is not yet posted for October. Watch that space for a new puzzle soon.
I'm still planning to do Puzzlecrack later this month (20th-24th) with some of my usual compatriots. There is nothing to see yet at Puzzlecrack's site. We probably won't have anybody on the ground at UIUC to win the whole thing, but if we are in contention we'll be looking for somebody Thursday, probably.
|
|
|
| Current, upcoming, and past puzzles |
[Sep. 24th, 2008|03:18 pm] |
Miscellaneous stuff:- verve640 created a puzzle site, justinspuzzles.com . He has a few crosswords with some extra stuff to solve at the end. I found them rather easy. If you enjoy this kind of puzzle but find many examples of them too difficult, you might enjoy these. Hopefully he makes more puzzles.
- As I mentioned in my last post, Puzzlecrack 2008 is coming. The site still redirects into the 2007 site right now, but they recently sent out e-mail about the 2008 event which is Monday-Friday October 20-24.
- Somebody recently got me thinking about TimeHunt again. I wrote about it at some length about two years ago, but the bulk of the solving on this game happened before I started this blog. I found some of my old notes from the later parts of this game, and thought I'd write some more, to fill in the huge gap between the intro material and the final meta puzzle from my earlier post.
( More about TimeHunt )
|
|
|
| This weekend's puzzle hunts |
[Sep. 13th, 2008|11:05 pm] |
I didn't plan on attending the Harvard hunt this year after being rather unimpressed with their past hunts, as well as annoyed at the way they stuck a rather large number of Harvard students with the small team of people I brought in person to the hunt two years ago. (Helping unattached hunters participate is one thing, but having more unattached hunters join you than the number of people you started with seemed excessive.)
Last night, after reading projectyl 's post about having had fun with it, I did look at the puzzles last night for long enough to solve all but one of the first round puzzles (easier ones, as they like to do in this event) and do what I was supposed to do with the compass at this point, but it was too late for me to do the second round. I made some progress on Double Trouble, and in the morning I did the obvious thing on Pseudocharitably and failed to see how to extract an answer from it.
After taking time to play my turns on Kingdom of Loathing, P&A was out, and I spent much of the day (with meal and other breaks) working on the puzzles, and finished the meta after solving 7 of the puzzles a little less than 12 hours from the release time.
Now I have Harvard round 2, the front matter of P&A, and the Forsmarts puzzle book linked in my last post to keep me busy for a while. And there is also the Enigma, as always. I've completed a pass through the September issue and I've gone back to do some of the incomplete stuff in August. The combiflatting offer still stands; if you want help writing a flat, let me know. I'll do one flat with anybody, and more given the time and inspiration. I have bases available for those more poetically inclined who have trouble thinking of good bases to clue.
|
|
|
| May puzzles |
[May. 3rd, 2008|07:02 am] |
And a recap of some of the April ones.
- My team for CISRA has locked in 3rd place, 1 point behind thedan 's team and one Australian student team who, unlike us, did not take an extra day to solve String Theory. But thanks to projectyl, we solved the non-scoring meta puzzle, so far the only team to do so. If they had scored it like any other puzzle, we would be winning. No spoilers about these puzzles in this post, since teams may be still trying to solve them.
- There was also another tournament at KaBauble, where I finished 3rd again. Yes, this makes another pair of thirds to add to those in my last post.
- Last weekend, before CISRA's 2nd round started, a slightly different team membership that was very disorganized, with only me here the whole time, also solved UIUC's PuzzleCrunch (coming in 7th). And we also test-solved another puzzle set to be released soon.
- Also last weekend, I missed the German WPC qualifier's first round. They invite the top 20 German solvers plus last year's team to a real-life meeting for the final determination of the team members, but you can go try the puzzles now (I have printed them and may look at them later today.) If you want to simulate competition conditions, give yourself 2.5 hours to solve them. If you are stumped, you can check the solutions, or maybe you just want to compare scores.
- Also also, a new issue of P&A Magazine came out. If you wonder why I am not in the list of the first ten solvers this month, it was because I was doing three puzzle hunts in the week after P&A came out. And I am counting this as an April puzzle because it came out so close to the end of April.
- A quarterly pentomino puzzle I do is at a new site. Note that they only have the usual calculator prize for teens this time, but occasionally they have other prizes open to everybody.
- Of course, there is a new Enigma and a new Math Magic problem (last month's was very productive with lots of interesting solutions).
- The IBM Ponder This team did not manage to get their May puzzle up yet, but I am sure it will be there soon.
- You can also register for the 2008 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship, to be held a Saturday in mid-June. (Hey, if I can include April puzzles in the May puzzle post, I can put June ones here too.)
In other puzzle-related news, I have revived a long-dormant combiflat attempt to try to get it into the upcoming 125th anniversary issue of the Enigma. There may be some readers who were present when our combinom was coined at a gathering. The rest of you will have to wait until July to see what I am talking about. We were supposed to write a flat so that the combinom could actually get used, but I didn't like something my versifier did in the first draft, and then it got forgotten about, though I have brought it up again a couple times over the years(!) since the first draft was written. |
|
|
| Thirds |
[Apr. 15th, 2008|08:11 pm] |
A couple of third place finishes last weekend in activities I mentioned recently.
I mentioned recently that my team entered the Melbourne University hunt. Yes, we were playing for fun, but when it came down to the end, we solved all the puzzles (backsolving some from the final meta) and then proceeded to solve the meta puzzle on Saturday before it was over, leading to an approximate location on campus and a vague idea of what we were looking for there. So, now what? We weren't supposed to reach that point. :-) We got somebody there to go search for us for a share of the prize if we won. They didn't find it fast enough; another team beat them there. But it was fun. And there was delicious irony of an American team almost winning a hunt that was themed about Australia being surreptitously turned into the United States. We placed 3rd because teams other than the winning one were ranked based on points earned from puzzles solved, and we were slower to solve some puzzles than one other team that completed all of them.
Then Sunday, one of the new features at KaBauble (formerly ZChurk) was a little tournament. This didn't go off quite as planned, due to a tile with two blanks still not being perfected, so the first of 3 rounds was scrapped and the tournament scored based on the other two. And I finished 3rd, again. |
|
|
| MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Completed |
[Jan. 20th, 2008|10:32 pm] |
It's over. And it was a quite a smashing success, despite running a little longer than we'd planned. Even as the hunt was running into Sunday evening, the teams we were hearing from were having fun and enjoying themselves, and there were very few errata required. The Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight found the coin at a little past 8 PM tonight. Wrap-Up is in 26-100 at noon tomorrow.
|
|
|
| MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 |
[Jan. 17th, 2008|12:06 pm] |
Just 24 hours from now, the hunt I have been a part of creating for the last year will finally begin. By the end of the weekend it will be over. I'll have more posts then about the puzzles I wrote, the puzzles other people wrote which I enjoyed solving, and other stuff I learned along the way. But for fear of spoiling puzzles, none of this is being posted today. |
|
|
| Lots more puzzles for me |
[Mar. 25th, 2007|08:10 pm] |
I attended the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament over the weekend. This year, due to the Wordplay movie, the attendance increased 40% to nearly 700 participants. We strained the limits of the Stamford Marriott, using essentially all available meeting space and all the hotel rooms, with late registrants forced to stay at the Holiday Inn nearby. Next year the tournament will move to a larger Marriott hotel in Brooklyn. The hotel room cost will be higher, which may turn some people away, but the difference will be small enough ($75 per person for the typical tournament solver who stays two nights in the hotel and shares a room with one other person) that it will probably not keep too many people away, and Will Shortz hopes to draw in enough more New York City locals to make up the difference.
I continued my string of finishing just below the cutoff of getting thrust into the B division. This year there were 698 participants and I finished 141st, ever so close to that 20% mark that defines B solvers.
The new P&A Magazine is out. I showed off my colored pencils Thursday and Friday at Stamford while solving the color paint-by-numbers. I have solved or made great progress on many of the puzzles but only found the final answers on a couple. The busy environment at Stamford was not conducive to the concentration that I need to work on these puzzles, so after completing a first pass through the puzzle set I set it aside and worked on other puzzles the rest of the weekend, including a Ucaoimhu cryptic, some NYTimes and NYSun puzzles that were distributed on various handouts, and the first few puzzles in Frank Longo's sequel to the cranium crushing crosswords book.
The MUMS hunt starts tonight. I am going to join with some combination of the team I've been doing various hunts with in the past year, so on a bigger team than last year's two-man effort with Corey Plover which placed 21st. |
|
|
| February |
[Feb. 1st, 2007|07:36 pm] |
With the new month always comes new puzzles.
- The latest issue of the NPL's Enigma was waiting in my e-mail box this morning (or at least, the notification that I could download it was there).
- Erich Friedman has a new MathMagic puzzle up, more variations on placing chess pieces on a chessboard.
- The IBM Ponder This webmaster is late getting the puzzle up again, but I am sure it will be there soon.
- And I'm also told that the new issue of P&A Magazine will be available for download soon (the last on our subscription for those of you like me who subscribed as soon as this option became available last year - time to pay up and give Foggy his late Christmas present).
Meanwhile, I have been doing more puzzle writing than ever due to having won and gotten involved in writing the next versions of two different puzzle-hunt-type events. This gives me a little bit of a conflict of interest - which event am I writing puzzles for? - but only a little, because they are in different stages, with next year's Mystery Hunt still in the stage of coming up with themes and deciding on one, so my only actual puzzle-writing there has been on ideas that would only work there, or were already discussed with the team during the last hunt. The other event already has a theme, structure, and answers, and if I write a puzzle for one of those answers it obviously belongs there.
That said, I came up with a really inspired idea the other day, a puzzle that would only work once and really only works with the answer we had on our list, only to find that they were thinking of changing the part involving that answer. It is working out that the strength of this puzzle is making them try to avoid changing this answer. We'll see what happens, but in any case I can't say much more about this puzzle now. |
|
|
| too long without an update |
[Jan. 11th, 2007|03:34 pm] |
So tomorrow I am off to the MIT Mystery Hunt, for the 8th consecutive year. For the 3rd year, I'll be playing with the Palindrome team, this year known as Dr. Awkward. I could write more about the team changes this year, but most people who would read this already know.
But January is always a busy time of year for me, puzzle-wise.
- A couple little hunts sprang up last month: A Chintan Carol and The Name of the Rose.
- Puzzle-Up (the event by that name which I'm referring to) doesn't have any web presence, so no link. I have about half of it answered so far, in about a third of the time, which puts me on track to not finish given that the harder half remains.
- Last week I participated in the beta test for an upcoming Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. No, you won't get any hints out of me, but the puzzles were very good.
- There's this Vanishing Point game going on. They do not try to hide that it is a promotion for Windows Vista, but there are puzzles you can try.
- And, well, there's no Panda Magazine yet. Presumably we'll see one after the Mystery Hunt, since its editor is on the hunt-writing team, full of all the puzzles he wrote which didn't fit in the hunt. :-)
|
|
|
| TimeHunt is dead! |
[Nov. 26th, 2006|03:02 am] |
Well, it's been practically dead for a long time, but since some time earlier this year it's been more or less officially dead. Now there is a Red Hat Linux Apache test page. The Wayback Machine records TimeHunt as still being around this past January (though if you try to view the pages there you won't get far, as the flash into page tries to load other pages from the site which are no longer there).
TimeHunt was a long-running Internet based puzzle contest. It was extremely hard, and we only got as far as we did by having a large group (including sin_vraal, who I first met in TimeHunt) work together.
|
|
|
| Even more puzzles |
[Oct. 15th, 2006|04:12 pm] |
- I won a small puzzle contest (just one puzzle) on KoL recently. Although the list of items on the scrap of paper is KoL-related, no knowledge of KoL is required to solve it.
- Math puzzle madness: A few months ago somebody pointed me to Mathcamp, a summer math program for junior-high and high-school students, but somehow I got sidetracked onto the qualifying test for Mathpath, a similar thing targeted specifically for junior-high students. Recently I found the actual qualifying test for Mathcamp, as well as a puzzle hunt run during this year's Mathcamp. (Note that Mathcamp is over, as is summer, for that matter.)
- Puzzlecrack is an annual event at UIUC. This year's event starts tomorrow and they say they have prizes both for onsite and online solvers anywhere in the world.
- The World Puzzle Championship 2006 was last week in Bulgaria. Team USA won, by a good margin but not the complete runaway some predicted after the team's performance on the USPC this summer. Germany still had a chance until near the end of the competition. Germany's Ulrich Voigt won the individual championship.
|
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
