jdyer ([info]jdyer) wrote,
@ 2007-06-16 12:31:00
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My 2007 USPC results
My target goal was 250.

My actual score (presuming no typos) was... 180.

I'm feeling really discouraged about now. Doubly so in that I felt confident going in (in the instructions the puzzles seemed reasonable, and I prepared hard).

I got about 2/3 through the Kakuro but the combinatorial explosion at the end was just too much for me to finish it off.

The Masyu didn't seem to succumb to logic at all. I had to use uniqueness to get anywhere, and I still didn't finish.

Normally Fridge Magnets would be my thing but I just sat there staring.

Same for the Double Murder.

Favorite puzzle: The Fences variant. It really felt like an entirely new puzzle that I'd never tried before, yet I got it smoothly.

Best performance: No Parking. At least there was *something* to help retain my ego.

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[info]zotmeister
2007-06-16 08:39 pm UTC (link)
I felt much the same way going in: "Hey, these are mostly iterative puzzles! I'm going to screw through this thing!"

I was wrong. And how.

The bloody Maysu had me going nuts for far too long. I had to make a [sigh] guess in order to solve it, and even then I made a stupid error the first time through and had to erase the whole thing and start over. BUT! Studying the puzzle afterward, I found the linchpin I'd missed: it's the black dot diagonally between the 'E' and 'I' white dots. Its angle cannot open up-and-left because of 'E' or down-and-right because of 'I' - that much I knew. What I didn't see right away was that up-and-right was barred because of 'D' and the black dot down and right from it. (That's a layout I don't see very often, but really should commit to memory.) The rest of the puzzle is much more straightforward after drawing the line left-and-down through the linchpin.

The shame is that if I hadn't lost so much time to the Masyu and other distractions, I'd have just finished the Cross Sums in time. Damn it.

What's kinda bugging me now is the Corral. I stalled out on it bigtime, and I still don't see what I'm missing...

I didn't touch the Fence Posts with a ten-foot pole. (Twelve-foot, maybe, but definitely not ten-.) I figured I'd have no idea how to start it when I read the instructions yesterday and I confirmed that inside of ten seconds when I saw the actual puzzle.

Frankly, I'm just happy I found all ten differences, and quickly at that. I usually screw that up. I also liked Comic Strips. That was cute. I should have seen that one coming sooner, too.

And as for the Fridge Magnets, well... sorry. My fault. I didn't mean to make it that hard, honest. - ZM

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[info]jdyer
2007-06-16 09:05 pm UTC (link)
You're a contributor now? Very nice!

I did solve the Corral (although I just found out I missed one of the outside groups of 1 typing it in, grr) although I can't really pick specifically what logic got me there. I made an intuitive leap about the corner numbers and it all just fell into place. I'll go back over it and try to pick out what the lynchpin might be.

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[info]motris
2007-06-16 10:45 pm UTC (link)
The Corral was very very nice. It used a slow creep around the edges, but the 9, 7, 8, 8 communication was excellent. If anything, having noticed that gimmick, I probably solved it too fast and I think its one puzzle that should go down in points, to 25 (Circuit maze and masyu going up 5 to 20 each).

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[info]motris
2007-06-16 10:40 pm UTC (link)
Cool to have that submission there. That magnets and the masyu were the hardest logic solves for me but I liked the challenge.

The award for most painful though always goes to my nemesis, the counting puzzle. It indeed cracked my perfect score as I got it wrong.

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