Tuesday 15 February 2022

Puzzle design competition: results soon

This will be the penultimate post regarding the puzzle design competition. I have decided my top 3 and will be republishing the puzzles with credit over the next couple of days.  I hope you are all looking forward to finally being able to put names to puzzles!

I had fewer votes (10) than entries (12), which I find very curious - I’d like to hear what factors might have been holding people back, even if it’s just speculation.  To those who did vote, thank you very much for participating and leaving your comments, I am glad that you enjoyed this idea.

Some of the 10 votes were from entrants, which I had assumed wouldn’t really matter given I was expecting far more votes than entries, however before tallying up the votes it seems like the only sensible thing to do is to disregard author votes. I can’t see how an individual vote for oneself would not be significant in these circumstances, and given not every author voted there is clear unfairness here in my eyes. 

6 comments:

  1. I for one don't find it curious at all - I had predicted votes in the single digit. Perhaps many found it to be running too long to be bothered about. Besides, this is not the graest of fates this sort of endeavor could have met.
    Nonetheless, nice attempt at challenging puzzlesmiths. I am sure the winning entry was made-to-delight.

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  2. Hi Anuraag, I understand your point about the duration of the contest. But could you please elaborate your comment:

    “This is not the graest of fates this sort of endeavor could have met”

    Perhaps you could explain what other kinds of fate this sort of endeavor might have met?

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  3. I was almost sure that I would have gotten stuck on some of the hard ones. And partial solving makes no sense, if I want to make a fair vote. So I just didn't start at all.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Christoph that is useful to know - those 10/10 are certainly intimidating. Interestingly one of them had a shortcut via uniqueness techniques, but I didn’t take that into account knowing that some solvers prefer not to use these!

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  4. “Perhaps you could explain what other kinds of fate this sort of endeavor might have met?”

    That of fewer or no votes or entries which would have been a certain disappointment.

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  5. Congrats Kumaresan, you are rocking!!!

    ReplyDelete

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