Sunday 11 August 2013

Around the world in 80 puzzles - Introduction

Introduction

This article discusses the concept "Around the world in 80 puzzles" which is the code name for a novel competition structure that will cover a significant part of World Puzzle Championship 2013.

Background

WPC authors

Traditionally, all the puzzles of any WPC in the past have been provided by authors mostly from the hosting country (there are some known exceptions here having the odd international contributor, e.g. Eger 2005 or Minsk 2008 and perhaps more, but this does not change the main thrust). This means that a small local team usually ended up designing 200+ puzzles for the two-days event. While this paradigm has been the generally accepted course of event organisation, a number of thoughts have also been raised, including:

  • The diversity of puzzles, styles and ideas may be limited by the fact that only a handful of people create the entire agenda. 
  • Some countries that end up hosting multiple WPCs are likely to end up associated with a particular style that may not be well received on subsequent events they organise. This is particularly the case in the actual setup, with Hungary having hosted two WPCs in the recent 8 years and stepping up to do 2013 as well. There are significant concerns around that the WPC in China might be "just another Hungarian WPC".
  • Most of the countries, however, may not get to host a WPC over an extended period, which means that individual puzzle designers in those countries may never get a chance to provide any WPC puzzle in their lifetimes.
To address these thoughts, there seems to be a strong case of making the puzzle author crew international to a greater extent.

24-hours Puzzle Championship

The 24-hours Puzzle Championship, which we discuss here as a side note to provide context, is a yearly puzzle event in Hungary that started in 2000 and never missed a year ever since. While the initial few years had 14 local entrants only, the event has seen a tremendous growth, becoming a widely recognised international tournament from 2003, achieving attendance record of 77 puzzlers in 2005 (when held along with WPC) and a sustained track record of 30+ puzzlers ever since.

The tournament consists of thirteen (13) 100-minutes rounds. The puzzle authoring process is largely de-centralised, meaning that each of these 100-minutes puzzle sets are created by different people / teams (there is some level of coordination in place, of course, to ensure a reasonable level of consistency on scoring/difficulty principles). To ensure that authors can also compete (which was of course always a requirement), there are fourteen (14) puzzle sets so that each competitor skips one of them. Authors naturally skip their own set. In terms of scoring, there is a normalisation step across rounds in place that, without going too technical, is designed to ensure that any difference in puzzle set difficulties is accounted for.

Connecting the ideas

In an email discussion that started from the context of appointing a group to provide puzzles for WPC2013, Thomas Snyder brought up the idea of leveraging the experience of 24-hours puzzle championships for WPCs to involve a multitude of authors and thereby addressing the issues above. While the idea of changing the format of the entire WPC at once would sound a little harsh, the justification behind it clearly does hold water. We have chosen to take the idea forward and implement it for WPC 2013. We have chosen to scale it down to a prototype so that it only constitutes a relatively small part of the Championship, with the majority of the event remaining to be held on a more conventional basis. This allows participants to provide a more balanced feedback that may shape future events better.

These thoughts lead us to introduce:

Around the world in 80 puzzles

Setup

"Around the world in 80 puzzles" is the code name for a set of four consecutive rounds during 2013 World Puzzle Championship. Some basic facts:

  • Each of these rounds will last for sixty (60) minutes, with a 15 minutes break between each of them.
  • Each of these rounds will consist of twenty (20) puzzles. 
  • Every competitor will solve exactly three of these four rounds, and will skip exactly one.
  • Puzzles for these rounds will be provided by puzzle authors who are not based in Hungary and therefore are not members of the core puzzle author team. Moreover, the author(s) for these four rounds will be from four different countries.
  • The authors, skipping their own puzzle sets, are allowed to participate in the Championship as competitors. This is a key point and is discussed below in detail.

Authors

The selection of puzzle authors was made so that we have puzzle authors who are well known to the puzzle community, they have a proven track record of creating great puzzles and have been established solvers as well, to understand what's required for a WPC. In addition, given the format of this concept, we need to ensure authors are seen as honest and trustworthy competitors with the highest degree of integrity so that this concept is feasible to implement without bringing about questions over the integrity of WPC.

Also, we wanted to ensure that the term "Around the world" in the title actually holds water. While it's impossible to represent every continent, every country or every potential author in just four rounds, our selection ensures that at least on a continent level, the major traditional hubs of puzzle life are actually represented. Specificly, we have invited one author from each of "Americas", "Asia", "Western Europe" and "Eastern Europe". The authors had the choice of inviting additional established puzzle authors from their own countries for co-authoring the set and/or testing: as the list below suggests, all of them have chosen to do so. The list of authors are, in no particular ordering:


Team USA - representing "Americas":
Thomas Snyder (lead), Wei-Hwa Huang, Palmer Mebane

Team India - representing "Asia":
Prasanna Seshadri (lead), Amit Sowani

Team Netherlands - representing "Western Europe":
Bram de Laat (lead), Hans Eendebak, Tim Peeters, Richard Stolk

Team Serbia - representing "Eastern Europe":
Nikola Zivanovic (lead), Branko Ceranic, Cedomir Milanovic, Zoran Tanasic

Participation of authors as competitors

The puzzle authors above are eligible to enter the Championship as a competitor. As stated above, none of them will get to solve their own puzzles within the competition (obviously). In addition, none of their compatriots will get to solve their puzzles either. However, anybody in the list of names above who chooses to enter the Championship as a competitor will solve the puzzles from the other three teams under competition circumstances. Since this point can trigger some questions, let us explain the concept behind.

In previous Championships, nobody from the puzzle designer teams have entered the competition, but their compatriots were still eligible to compete. The key point of the underlying expectation is that anybody to design a puzzle for the Championship is expected to keep the puzzles they designed secret. This is the fundamental assumption behind the trust model: authors must not reveal any information about their own puzzles to anybody who may get to solve those puzzles in competition circumstances.

"Around the world in 80 puzzles" round uses the very same model of trust and makes the very same assumption. The people above have been asked (and have all committed to agree) that they strictly do not give any information about the puzzles they create to people outside their immediate team (names listed above) and the core organising team (none of whom competes, obviously).

Members of Team USA, for example, are aware of the puzzles they create themselves but they do not know anything about the puzzles e.g. Team India creates. The instructions for the puzzles by the Indian team will be known to Team USA at the time of the publication of the Instructions Booklet, i.e. at the time when everybody else will learn about the instructions. Therefore, the three rounds that potential Team USA members will get to solve in the Championship will be just as new to them as it will be to anybody else getting to solve those rounds.

Naturally, the trust model that is applied here relies on the individuals who play the role of puzzle authors here. This is one reason why we have carefully chosen the authors so that they are all well known and established members of the world puzzle community, and this is also the reason why all their names have been published here above, well in advance of the competition. It should be noted, however, that the expectation against puzzle authors not to reveal information about their puzzles is just identical to the expectation that has been there against all the puzzle authors of past Championships.

Having said all this, we are confident that the integrity of the Championship continues to be at the standard set out by its previous occurrences.

Scoring

Although all four rounds will be of equal length on time, of equal number of puzzles and - hopefully - roughly the same difficulty of puzzles, since different competitors solve a different set of rounds, we cannot simply add up the scores without running the risk of perceived differences in the difficulties of the rounds. Instead, the scoring will be scaled to the actual performance of the solvers, allowing for a round turning out to be more difficult than another one.

In case of the 24 hours championship, for example, a round winner gets 100 points and anyone else gets the percentage of their score relative to the winner. For example if Alice wins a 1000-points puzzle round by a score of 900, Bob scores 810 points and Carol finishes with 540, then Alice gets 100 points (for 100%), Bob gets 90 points (810/900 = 0.9 = 90%) and for Carol the same method yields 60 points (540/900 = 0.6 = 60%). 

At this event, we will be using something similar to the 24-hours system, although the scores will not be scaled to the round winning scores but something like "10th place" or "average score from 3rd to 7th place" instead. This is designed to ensure that if one competitor runs away from the field by a long way in one of the rounds, then the other competitors solving in that round should not be put at a disadvantage compared to those who were skipping that round. Of course, the competitor winning by a long way will still get rewarded by a very high score (percentage wise it will be higher than 100).

The exact details will be specified later, most likely at the time of publishing the instructions booklet.


Conclusion

We (organisers and authors) all look forward to trialling this concept at a World Puzzle Championship. We feel this opens the possibility for future host countries without a sufficient number of puzzle designers to host the event in a few years, also for puzzle designers who do not want to host the entire event to be able to contribute puzzles to a future Championship.

For any questions / remarks, please contact Zoltan Nemeth or Gyorgy Istvan.




20 comments:

  1. Best of luck Prasanna Sheshadri :) Bring Glory to India and Asia

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  2. Very nice concept. It will create more puzzle creators in coming days. In India, I could see more and more people creating puzzles now a days.

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  3. Thanks to the organizers for providing this opportunity. Really proud to be a part of this initiative. Hoping this format catches so that the WPC (and maybe WSC too, in future) provides a platform to the best authors as well as the best solvers.

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  4. I do not agree with this concept.

    In my honest opinion, the country, that is not capable to provide puzzles for the championship (whichever source, but without such experiments in the structure of the competition) should not host the event.

    I fear that the coin-toss "which of the 4 rounds (and styles!) you would not solve" will affect the results of the championship significantly.

    I think there is no real obstacle for a puzzlemaker from whichever place in the world to participate on preparation of the puzzles for WS/PC. If he/she wants to. But he/she would not participate as a player in that one particular championship. That is obvious in my point of view. I find this "80 puzzles..." to be only an artificial way to overcome this obviousness.

    Without any reference to this discussion contribution, I am looking forward to be in Beijing in October!

    Jan Novotny
    (WS/PC competitor from the Czech Republic)

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  5. Dear Organisers,

    Could you please provide us complete details about that innovative system?


    Not all competitors will solve same puzzle sets and that brings lot of possible difficulties.
    Regardless which scoring formula is applied, you can't eliminate the fact which Jan mentioned. All competitors have different favourites among the puzzle creators and puzzle variants. With this concept some competitors might benefit from good puzzle set selection, while others might get unfavourable one.

    Another thing is how you accomplish that all groups of competitors for each set will have similar strength? Will you assign competitors to the groups randomly or according to some rule?

    Also note that puzzle solving strength of each authors team can play some role.
    Team USA is expected to be stronger in puzzle solving than other three teams. I can imagine all four members of team USA can finnish in top 10 in rounds they will solve. That means higher score for 10th place in these rounds --> lower score for others (and benefit for those participating in USA round).


    For achieving better fairness it needs further discussion about this concept. And this can be only done if we know exact details about how the scoring and the players distribution to the groups work.

    So please provide us these details soon, it is not good idea to wait until the time of publishing the IB, it might be too late.

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  6. Thanks for your comments, Jan and Jakub. The transparency of your feedback is much appreciated.

    From here and from other sources of feedback, the following points have been taken and will be addressed in subsequent communication (cannot promise immediately but I agree that needs to be earlier than IB time):

    - Trust issues with puzzle authors competing.

    - The possibility that different people solving different puzzles may offer advantage or disadvantage to some of them.

    - How "which set is skipped by whom" will be determined requires clarification as it was not discussed anywhere yet.

    - How exactly scoring will work requires substantial clarification. Also, assess if there is a potentially material imbalance in the sets of people skipping each of the rounds (excellent point Jakub).

    I can tell you that I'll take these details very seriously and do whatever it takes to address them.

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  7. Although this concept looks definitely interesting, I have the same concern as Jakub; more discussion will be required.

    And here is another fear: the difficulty of fully sharing information. I'd like to mention this from two sides, IT and language.
    I noticed this issue by reading your post at Facebook, but it’s true that not all participants have a Facebook account. I don't know whether this issue has introduced at outside the Facebook or Internet world, but I can easily assume that most of them still haven't been even aware of this issue.
    And language-barrier is also big problem. It’s pretty hard for poor English speakers (of course including me!) to catch up with the exact stream of discussion. Especially this year the championships will be held in Beijing and some Asians are expected to take part in these events for the first time, who are not fluent in English in general I think.

    The essence of my content is that this issue is very important and should not be resolved by the only people who have both a kind of IT-communication skill and English capability. I don't have the best solution for my concern, but some small regard will improve the situation: setting a link to this blog on the official championship page (it will be the principle source of information about the championships and almost all of the participants will check it), sending an e-mail to all the WPF members and team-captains (team-members could be explained this issue in their native language via each local organization), and so on.

    Thank you very much for your reading!

    Yuhei Kusui (Japan)

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  8. This concept looks interesting, however it is definitely not suitable for World Sudoku/Puzzle Championship.
    I like the idea of 24HPC, but I consider this contest as a funny meeting of puzzle enthusiasts, who enjoy solving all day and all night. I participated at one 24HPC and was proud of introducing my own set of puzzles, without any expectations of good positioning. But WS/PC is utterly different competition.

    I could hardly see any advantages of this concept. As Jan said, if a country (team of authors) have no proper conditions, it should not organise a World Championship. Here in Slovakia, we wants to organize Winter Olympic Games, but we have no conditions, no ski centres, no money, no organizers and also no Olympic Games ... how easy. If a country wants to introduce its own puzzle set, it should prepare something else - E.G. contest at LMI, sudoku GP, or their own online national championship.

    I could not understand the key of authors choice. To be honest, I am overloaded by puzzles of these puzzlers. They prepare puzzles on a daily/weekly base and this brings advantage to the blog fans, which do not includes, for example, me. I really love WPC because of the puzzle diversity, which differs from country to country. Each of the WPC I attended was absolutely different and that´s why it is World Championship.
    At 24HPC, the core of the puzzle types is usually the same and probably 30% of puzzle types are innovatives. At WPC, this should raise two possible problems: 1) all these rounds should have a number of basic puzzle types, which may repeat, or on the other hand 2) these rounds may be sets of innovative, strange, new puzzles that should be not passend for all solvers.
    The only possible solution is that these four couples should cooperate and communicate and this is another problem - teams of USA, India, Serbia and Netherlands should know the puzzle types (by the other countries) months in advantage.

    Also, there are many countries, including my own, which are not including in these masquerade. So if you want to realize such a concept, you should ask each participating country to prepare one round of the championship OR let the solvers to compete in all four rounds and the authors will skip their own sets. Please, do not consider my opinions as a attack on the puzzle authors, but I really think, that this concept brings only an advantage to the authoring countries, and a chaos for everybody else. And finally, these four countries are definitely not countries, that should never organize such an event, don´t you think?

    Best regards
    Matus Demiger (Slovakia)

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  9. Yuhei - thanks for your comments.

    Regarding the information flow, Facebook is just one of the channels where this page was shared, a link was also put on worldpuzzle.org forum and I had touched base with Hana (Director of WPF) to ensure that she sends an official notification about this page to all WPF members who would then have the opportunity to discuss with their competitors directly. Hana has kindly offered to do this communication, it has either happened already or will happen shortly I'm sure.

    This would also help people through with the language barrier, which was your other point (your English actually reads excellent, though of course I understand that some other competitors may need clarification in their native language).

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  10. Matus - thanks for your response. You do bring up a lot of different points. It seems that in some of these, you are missing context - this is not your fault of course, it's because some of the context may not have been sufficiently given. With the nature of communicating complex concepts like this one to a diverse and educated audience like you all are, it's inevitable that if the write-up is too short it's missing important bits of context, or if it's too long then not everybody will read all details and there you go again. It's a delicate balancing act that's very difficult to get right - one always learns.


    Let me go through your points then and provide necessary context.


    "if a country (team of authors) have no proper conditions, it should not organise a World Championship. Here in Slovakia, we wants to organize Winter Olympic Games, but we have no conditions, no ski centres, no money, no organizers and also no Olympic Games ... how easy."

    First of all, I don't like using analogues from the world of sport for the purposes or arguing about WPC. It would be far too easy for me to ask back "why do you think FIFA World Cup is brought to countries like South Africa or Qatar when those countries had no stadia at the time of the decisions?" - but then I would argue that historic context, economic details, attendance profile and competition profile are very different between these sports (even between themselves) and the world of puzzles. I could bring you hundreds of other examples where badly chosen sport analogues could lead you to implement poor decisions or systems for WPC.

    Secondly, China as a venue was chosen by the General Assembly knowing that they were going to ask for help in authoring puzzles. In the context of this discussion, this is a given. I don't see a point in questioning the venue.

    (continued)

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  11. "I could not understand the key of authors choice. To be honest, I am overloaded by puzzles of these puzzlers. They prepare puzzles on a daily/weekly base and this brings advantage to the blog fans, which do not includes, for example, me. "

    I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. Are you overloaded with their puzzles or do you feel disadvantaged because you don't have enough of their puzzles? You can argue for either one of those but not both.


    "At WPC, this should raise two possible problems: 1) all these rounds should have a number of basic puzzle types, which may repeat, or on the other hand 2) these rounds may be sets of innovative, strange, new puzzles that should be not passend for all solvers.
    The only possible solution is that these four couples should cooperate and communicate and this is another problem - teams of USA, India, Serbia and Netherlands should know the puzzle types (by the other countries) months in advantage. "

    You raise good points here, in fact you provided a good layout on how the organisation work behind the very idea should work :)

    First of all, authors were specificly asked to keep to certain guidelines in terms of what the proportion of classics/variations/innovatives should be, in terms of keeping a balance on puzzle difficulty, keeping the genres diverse, etc. Although I did not provide very exact metrics in either of these categories, I can tell you that the authors proved to be mature enough to understand the message and the puzzle sets they came up with satisfy those guidelines to a very high extent.

    Secondly, I have asked authors to come up with a plan of their puzzle sets so that they send me the list of puzzle types they are planning to include, without actually creating those puzzles yet. Once they all have done so, we (the core team) went through all those puzzle types, reviewed the list against each other and against the plans that we were having ourselves for the rounds outside the scope of "Around the world", and provided feedback to authors on which types they are welcome to include and which types we ask them to replace.

    This process not only ensures that there are no significant overlaps in the puzzle types over the event (I'm saying "no significant overlaps" because there may be small exceptions for a number of reasons including round themes, sheer beauty of particular puzzles, etc), it also ensures that even the four puzzle authors themselves do not have a strong idea on what the other authors are up to (since they should not know any information on puzzles they will solve, at least not earlier than everybody else), other than being told "do not include Battleships" without revealing who else created it.

    Thirdly, there will surely be some innovative puzzles in these rounds, such as there have been innovative puzzles in virtually every previous WPCs and I can assure you that the proportion of these innovatives is completely in line with what you may have experienced on previous occasions.

    Lastly, the core team has taken significant efforts of due diligence to ensure that the difficulty profile of these four rounds is well balanced. More on this in a follow-up post that addresses scoring and related issues.

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  12. (final chunk)


    "Also, there are many countries, including my own, which are not including in these masquerade. So if you want to realize such a concept, you should ask each participating country to prepare one round of the championship OR let the solvers to compete in all four rounds and the authors will skip their own sets. Please, do not consider my opinions as a attack on the puzzle authors, but I really think, that this concept brings only an advantage to the authoring countries, and a chaos for everybody else. And finally, these four countries are definitely not countries, that should never organize such an event, don´t you think?"

    (A bit of feedback in brackets - I am entirely sure that you did not intend to come across as someone being frustrated just because you were not selected as an author - in that case I would probably choose my words a little more carefully and refrain from using the likes of "masquerade" and "chaos".)

    Again I cannot comment whether each of those countries are able or willing to host a WPC, since this is not in scope for this discussion.

    Asking all participating countries to bring their own sets is not a realistic option for a number of reasons, some of them may not be willing to do so, some others may not be capable of doing so, some other countries may not be able to confirm their participation early enough to be considered for such a process, and a number of similar practical issues arise - and I believe that it would be a far more radical change with far more unpredictable subtleties than this one, therefore I am not sure if you were really thinking this through before suggesting it as an option. The other option of authors imposing disadvantage on them is more up to discussion, there might be people who would agree to do this but I don't think this is a viable long term option.

    Finally, I cannot see neither why this system brings an advantage to authoring countries, nor why it would bring chaos to all others. Both "authors" and "others" will be competing by the means of solving puzzles, this includes 3 out of 4 sets within the "Around the world" framework, but with the remaining 75% of the entire Championship organised on a completely conventional basis, I do not see how your somewhat extreme categories of "advantage" and "chaos" could be justified.

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  13. Let me say two things:

    1. When I proposed this idea, it was specifically to address the concern of a host nation that was unable to provide all the puzzles for a WPC. I am excited China is able to host this year's tournament, and that the WPF and the appointed competition director found a way to provide puzzles for a host that could not construct both events. From the past Beijing Sudoku Tournaments, which had some of the best organization of any I have been at, I expect the Chinese to be incredible hosts even if they did not provide 100% of the puzzles.

    2. I did not propose the idea to gain any competitive advantage and I have been very disappointed to read some comments, particularly on Facebook, that singled me out by name as trying to gain any such advantage. I did not even expect the idea to go anywhere, but it seemed reasonable enough to the Competition Director and team that it was pursued in this 4x20 puzzle way as a trial experiment. Zoltan and others will decide what to do on scoring, but if there is a uniform concern that the authors are gaining an advantage, then I have a recommendation that I am willing to accept that will instead turn authors into having a disadvantage. I am willing to let all solvers, except authors, solve 4 rounds and keep their best 3 scores. I am willing to keep 3 of 3 scores for the rounds I am allowed to compete in. I am speaking for myself and not the other authors or even other members of Team USA, but I am willing to face this disadvantage so that the competition results do not lead to any questioning of the integrity of the podium results. Perhaps Zoltan and others can find a result that does not require any group to face a disadvantage, real or perceived.

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    1. I think best 3 from 4 sounds like the simplest and most elegant solution - and I hope the authors can agree to this. It will certainly be easier than coming up with a complicated way of normalising scores.

      My main concern is not about integrity of and potential advantages gained by the authors, rather the integrity of the competition as a whole if one solver is not doing exactly the same set of puzzles as the next. Objectively, you weaken your means of comparison for solvers!

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    2. Further to this, I would suggest that in future years that if you want to broaden authors, it should be done in the knowledge that the author will be scoring 0 for the relevant rounds. Best 3 from 4 still gives a theoretical incentive for one author to provide a more difficult set than another author.

      It should be noted that this system provides a big incentive for the best solvers not to provide puzzles. But this only rules out a comparative minority of potential WSC/WPC participants.

      Of course this is completely unworkable this year - retrospectively asking an authors to take the hit of a 0 round is completely unfair.

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    3. While this is probably for a different discussion, I'll note that when a WPC has a round so long that the top solver may only finish 60% of the puzzles, all competitors are de facto solving a different championship already, as you'll find the top 10 have solved a different mix of things to get points and many competitors have solved puzzles others have not even had the time to attempt. Yes, solvers are choosing their favorite types and not being told what to skip, but variations in scoring and difficulty will result in benefits to competitors simply because no person can possibly do everything. What may bother you here is that this is de jure and not de facto in how it gets solvers to solve different puzzles but it is not a new experience.

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    4. "a theoretical incentive for one author to provide a more difficult set than another author. "

      This isn't applicable if the sets have a central team looking into them. As is the case this time, and should be at any time. I'm not sure why this keeps coming up. The Hungarians had a lot of back and forth with me and were quite firm about their guidelines, and I respected that, and I assume it was the same for other authors. Scoring 0 sounds like an extreme and unnecessary measure when there's a central team mediating.

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    5. Thomas: I have thought about choosing which puzzles to do in a long round before. Without wanting to go too deeply into that discussion, I will say that you highlight the heart of the issue. Traditionally, you are free to start any puzzle you like in a WPC round and skip over them based on your best judgement. There's an argument to say that this kind of meta-puzzle solving is a valid skill to be measured by competition anyway. My preference as a competition designer, especially for one round competitions, is to have rounds that can be finished by some solvers.

      PS: perhaps I should have said "more difficult for the author." What if one author knew that another author had a relative solving weakness? They could make plenty of puzzles of that style for their round, of the dictated central standard of difficulty, and still gain an advantage.

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    6. I'd also like to highlight the difference between choosing which unseen puzzles to solve based only on a published list of types/authors, and actually being able to see a puzzle once the round has started!

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  14. There's been some negative comments, and some worried people.
    So I'd like to say that I think it's all a good idea, and I appreciate that the organizers are listening to the competitors feedback.

    I'm looking forward to going to Beijing, and I know this event would not be possible if we insisted that the host country makes all the puzzles. There are many 'smaller' countries that could could host a WS/PC if they can get assistance for making world-quality puzzles. And this will become necessary and normal, if the 'stronger' countries are not willing/able to host.

    As far as this year goes, I trust the team can organise that each round has a roughly equal-strength set of competitors. And that each round has a similar quality level. We're trusting them with the other 75% of the puzzles!

    My only request is that the competitors know before the start which rounds we are assigned, so that we don't practise every round unnecessarily.

    Definitely no need to penalise the authors, they are helping make this WPC better and I appreciate that. (I think they're already being disadvantaged anyway because they're forced to skip a round of their 'favourite' puzzles).

    Ideas for future years can wait for now, I'm sure it will be an interesting discussion at the dinner tables of the Chateau Laffitte...

    Change can be good? :-)

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