tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post6504103403192179101..comments2013-10-03T14:50:24.340-07:00Comments on World Puzzle Championship 2013: Around the world in 80 puzzles - IntroductionZoltan Nemethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13304719092340574048noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-32379432649402130412013-08-20T17:12:50.295-07:002013-08-20T17:12:50.295-07:00There's been some negative comments, and some ...There's been some negative comments, and some worried people.<br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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...<br /><br />Change can be good? :-)<br /> James McGowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09477107207813026710noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-73757408156460650242013-08-20T05:30:31.147-07:002013-08-20T05:30:31.147-07:00I'd also like to highlight the difference betw...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!Tom Collyerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03663579809785456634noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-86711015221183104682013-08-20T04:42:37.751-07:002013-08-20T04:42:37.751-07:00Thomas: I have thought about choosing which puzzle...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.<br /><br />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.Tom Collyerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03663579809785456634noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-3856834214539993042013-08-17T14:48:26.634-07:002013-08-17T14:48:26.634-07:00"a theoretical incentive for one author to pr..."a theoretical incentive for one author to provide a more difficult set than another author. "<br /><br />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. Prasanna Seshadrihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08199845359816353540noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-38209263762125913272013-08-16T10:17:15.650-07:002013-08-16T10:17:15.650-07:00While this is probably for a different discussion,...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.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08977051874359815573noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-16150734494999796952013-08-16T02:39:34.859-07:002013-08-16T02:39:34.859-07:00Further to this, I would suggest that in future ye...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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />Of course this is completely unworkable this year - retrospectively asking an authors to take the hit of a 0 round is completely unfair.Tom Collyerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03663579809785456634noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-28186874842213413082013-08-16T02:21:31.356-07:002013-08-16T02:21:31.356-07:00I think best 3 from 4 sounds like the simplest and...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.<br /><br />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!Tom Collyerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03663579809785456634noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-7601507985519696432013-08-15T00:00:07.132-07:002013-08-15T00:00:07.132-07:00Let me say two things:
1. When I proposed this id...Let me say two things:<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08977051874359815573noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-62284013768379696282013-08-14T04:50:59.524-07:002013-08-14T04:50:59.524-07:00(final chunk)
"Also, there are many countr...(final chunk)<br /><br /><br /> "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?"<br /><br />(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".)<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br />Zoltan Nemethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13304719092340574048noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-81342365443214580972013-08-14T04:50:28.814-07:002013-08-14T04:50:28.814-07:00"I could not understand the key of authors ch..."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. "<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />"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. <br />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. "<br /><br />You raise good points here, in fact you provided a good layout on how the organisation work behind the very idea should work :)<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br />Zoltan Nemethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13304719092340574048noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-91551465374761126402013-08-14T04:49:26.478-07:002013-08-14T04:49:26.478-07:00Matus - thanks for your response. You do bring up ...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.<br /><br /><br />Let me go through your points then and provide necessary context.<br /><br /><br />"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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />(continued)Zoltan Nemethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13304719092340574048noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-32495260049747713772013-08-14T03:56:45.624-07:002013-08-14T03:56:45.624-07:00Yuhei - thanks for your comments.
Regarding the i...Yuhei - thanks for your comments.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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). Zoltan Nemethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13304719092340574048noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-34432365846367411282013-08-14T03:17:55.831-07:002013-08-14T03:17:55.831-07:00This concept looks interesting, however it is defi...This concept looks interesting, however it is definitely not suitable for World Sudoku/Puzzle Championship. <br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br />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. <br />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. <br /><br />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?<br /><br />Best regards<br />Matus Demiger (Slovakia)Matúš Demigerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03403387306964000029noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-86851237723959411252013-08-13T19:59:52.945-07:002013-08-13T19:59:52.945-07:00Although this concept looks definitely interesting...Although this concept looks definitely interesting, I have the same concern as Jakub; more discussion will be required.<br /><br />And here is another fear: the difficulty of fully sharing information. I'd like to mention this from two sides, IT and language.<br />I noticed this issue by reading your post at Facebook, but it‚Äôs 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.<br />And language-barrier is also big problem. It‚Äôs 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Thank you very much for your reading!<br /><br />Yuhei Kusui (Japan)Yuhei Kusuihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03072870780164377592noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-66675556661065328192013-08-13T14:29:08.995-07:002013-08-13T14:29:08.995-07:00Thanks for your comments, Jan and Jakub. The trans...Thanks for your comments, Jan and Jakub. The transparency of your feedback is much appreciated.<br /><br />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):<br /><br />- Trust issues with puzzle authors competing.<br /><br />- The possibility that different people solving different puzzles may offer advantage or disadvantage to some of them.<br /><br />- How "which set is skipped by whom" will be determined requires clarification as it was not discussed anywhere yet.<br /><br />- 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).<br /><br />I can tell you that I'll take these details very seriously and do whatever it takes to address them. Zoltan Nemethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13304719092340574048noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-85883637431813336022013-08-13T13:57:36.489-07:002013-08-13T13:57:36.489-07:00Dear Organisers,
Could you please provide us comp...Dear Organisers,<br /><br />Could you please provide us complete details about that innovative system?<br /><br /><br />Not all competitors will solve same puzzle sets and that brings lot of possible difficulties.<br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />Also note that puzzle solving strength of each authors team can play some role.<br />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).<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Gotrochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04418874954202096597noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-47709792759367156682013-08-13T02:11:35.911-07:002013-08-13T02:11:35.911-07:00I do not agree with this concept.
In my honest op...I do not agree with this concept.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Without any reference to this discussion contribution, I am looking forward to be in Beijing in October!<br /><br />Jan Novotny<br />(WS/PC competitor from the Czech Republic)KrtekHonzahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11930588982472479409noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-7947070321916224142013-08-12T00:00:45.433-07:002013-08-12T00:00:45.433-07:00Thanks to the organizers for providing this opport...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. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-73283646016087500122013-08-11T23:17:48.467-07:002013-08-11T23:17:48.467-07:00Very nice concept. It will create more puzzle crea...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. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154789840463275501.post-19140626064228320972013-08-11T11:10:22.265-07:002013-08-11T11:10:22.265-07:00Best of luck Prasanna Sheshadri :) Bring Glory to ...Best of luck Prasanna Sheshadri :) Bring Glory to India and AsiaAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com