All righty...so if everything goes according to plan, both Artie and I will be participating in the 2008 US Puzzle Championships (http://wpc.puzzles.com/index.htm) on Saturday, June 14. I know we have a lot of really smart people here, so I figured we'd throw the challenge out there and see if anyone could beat either of our scores this year. No prizes though, just bragging rights. :D

The championships are all done online. It's a timed test, starting at 1 PM EDT. You CAN participate and have your score recorded even if you aren't in the US -- actually, many countries use the US quiz to choose their representatives for the World Puzzle Championships. If you want to play, you have to register by June 12. I recommend that you read their tips and try the practice quiz, and DEFINITELY download the test to review the day before. Submitting each answer as you finish is also a good idea -- you never know when their server or your internet might be completely evil.

Of course, if you don't want to play, you can always speculate as to who will pull down the high score this year. :dgrin:

For your competitors' stats:
Carencey will be competing for the third time this year. Past scores are a 149 in 2006 (yay!) and an 83 in 2007, after making the ill-advised decision to wrestle with a big-value question for over an hour and then missing it.
Artie is in for his sixth attempt, and has previously scored a 90, 97, 105, 65, and a 100 in 2007, after a typo on the answer sheet cost him another 20 or so points.

So the matchups are at an even 1:1, and we didn't even know we were competing against each other in previous years. :)
They do post scores with your real names (assuming the name you give them is your real one), so keep that in mind if you want to participate and post your scores in this thread. Also, everything is on the honor system -- so no sharing answers here before quiz time is up!

Looks like fun - and I see they have past years' tests and solutions available as well as the practice test.

No prizes? Does this mean you are finally out of Apollo bars? ;)

and yes, with that, I just proved my awesome 149 was a fluke. lol. Mistakes killed me again, I made one on the regular Sudoku, the Kuromasu puzzle, AND the SuDon'tku. Loads of time wasted. I almost got back through the SuDon'tKu but came up short. Will post the answers I did get here after about half an hour, but if everything I entered was right, I'll have a...64. sheesh.

Wow, that was tough. There must be a bit more of a learning curve and tricks to some of these puzzles than I thought at first, because some of the higher scores (200+ points) from past years seem impossible in the time given.

I submitted answers for 6 questions (85 points total) and they are correct according to the solutions page posted today. I was eating lunch while printing and working the first problem (the 10 pt battleship), and messed something up and did not get a chance to go back and fix it (afterwards, it just took another 5 minutes to fix that one), so I did not submit that one.

I submitted answers for
Sudoku - 15 points
Sum Figure - 5 points
Double Feature - 15 points
Black Pearl - 10 points
Tilted Weights - 20 points
Distances - 20 points

After the test, I worked on most of the other puzzles:

The first number block was tricky and I thought I proved it was impossible for a while. I'm going to have to think more about how to solve Kuromasu - it was only 15 points, but seems difficult to know whether you are on the right track to me. Murder No. 6 was not too bad but took awhile. I think Dot Triangles had too many options to be solvable in a short period of time (no easy way to narrow the options, so it's trial and error on a large set of options) - I'll be interested to see the success rate on that one when the statistics come out. I solved Sheep In Fences correctly without too much trouble.

As for the big point problems, I worked on SuDON'Tku (worth 30 points), filling in boxes with options and putting labels on the "missing" numbers for each row, column and area - I think that problem could take a couple hours to solve correctly (and I have not finished it yet)... I think this is one were "expert knowledge" of some kind of patterns must be a big help to solving quickly.

I solved KakurOh (worth 35 points) and I think it easily could occupy someone for the full 2.5 hours... just a lot of numbers and addition to keep up with.

So, that was a fun diversion - thanks for sharing the link, Carencey!
(Now I'm going to soak my head).

85 definitely beats my 64 (all of those were correct) and you and Artie should be pretty close in score, although if they cut the board at 100 again none of us will be on it, lol. I am really kicking myself for whiffing the Sudoku. I don't usually make mistakes on those, and I should have gone back to that with the last fifteen minutes rather than trying to fix the SuDON'Tku. Could have had 35 more points without that general brainlessness, also I completely missed the part of the SuDONTku instructions where the 9s wouldn't be missing. That would likely have headed off that mistake I made anyway.

The Ampers& crisscross is interesting. I came up with the mirror image solution on that, after the fact of course, and wonder if they'd accept it. My answer, which is not up as the correct answer right now, is RSAD &M NOAS RDCO HR LSDD. It's what you get if you have RWANDAN running down the left and RIBANDS across the top, and make the exact same crosses they did to finish. It certainly appears to be a valid solution to me. There's even an irrelevant mistake in their grid (NUCANDO).

Distances was cake. Why didn't I try that one? 20 points, and I finished it in about 5 minutes. Sum Figure was also easy, but was only 5 points so I didn't even want to bother with it.

Kuromasu and Corral I was able to finish later, but both took long enough that I wouldn't have gotten very far with them. I did see where I went astray in Kuromasu the first time though.

you are my favorite geek Caren !!
lolz :kiss: