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Iron Puzzler post: the event
Nov. 7th, 2006 01:48 amIron Puzzler was a pretty neat event.
The idea was: from 9am Saturday until midnight, groups would work to create puzzles. Each group had to create a paper-based puzzle (one that could be wholly duplicated on a copier), and a non-paper-based puzzle (one that could not). They had to incorporate some "secret ingredients" that we were told at the start of the event (which prevented people from going overboard creating puzzles beforehand, in theory). Afterwards, from midnight until 3pm Sunday (which turned into 1am-4pm with collating time), we'd have to solve as many puzzles as we could.
A group's score was based on:
1. Puzzle-solving score
2. How many people solved your puzzles
3. How people rated your puzzles
Since I know nobody's really going to read most of this except Matt and maybe Jeff, I'll say straight up: our team placed third overall in solving and third overall in puzzle rating, but we had an issue with solvability such that everyone solved our paper puzzle and only four groups out of thirteen solved our non-paper puzzle.
(The way the solvability scoring worked, it was on a curve where ideally you wanted 8-11 teams to solve it, 10 being ideal. Nobody solving it was bad, everybody solving it wasn't particularly good.)
Our paper puzzle was a crossword that Jeff and Jonobie wrote, and our non-paper puzzle was a Lego-word-building-unbuilding puzzle that... I forget who came up with it originally but Mike definitely pushed it through.
( okay, yeah, this is a lot of stuff about the event )
The idea was: from 9am Saturday until midnight, groups would work to create puzzles. Each group had to create a paper-based puzzle (one that could be wholly duplicated on a copier), and a non-paper-based puzzle (one that could not). They had to incorporate some "secret ingredients" that we were told at the start of the event (which prevented people from going overboard creating puzzles beforehand, in theory). Afterwards, from midnight until 3pm Sunday (which turned into 1am-4pm with collating time), we'd have to solve as many puzzles as we could.
A group's score was based on:
1. Puzzle-solving score
2. How many people solved your puzzles
3. How people rated your puzzles
Since I know nobody's really going to read most of this except Matt and maybe Jeff, I'll say straight up: our team placed third overall in solving and third overall in puzzle rating, but we had an issue with solvability such that everyone solved our paper puzzle and only four groups out of thirteen solved our non-paper puzzle.
(The way the solvability scoring worked, it was on a curve where ideally you wanted 8-11 teams to solve it, 10 being ideal. Nobody solving it was bad, everybody solving it wasn't particularly good.)
Our paper puzzle was a crossword that Jeff and Jonobie wrote, and our non-paper puzzle was a Lego-word-building-unbuilding puzzle that... I forget who came up with it originally but Mike definitely pushed it through.
( okay, yeah, this is a lot of stuff about the event )
