#82 - 24HPC recap + practice puzzles + unrelated Ice Walk
Last weekend the 20th edition of the 24 hour puzzle championship in Budapest took place!
I participated for the first time and had an absolute blast. I went in fully expecting to fall asleep halfway through as I can rarely stay awake for 24 hours on end, let alone while solving puzzles. Surprisingly, staying awake wasn't the hard part - there were some rounds in the middle of the night where I would occasionally doze off for a few seconds while stuck in a puzzle, but actively solving puzzles actually was a great distraction to keep my mind off the fact I wasn't sleeping. And while fatigue is definitely a factor, there also comes a point where you just get over it, and the last few rounds were actually some of my best.
Much more troublesome was the physical pain endured from sitting at a desk and holding a pencil all that time - at some point everything just starts hurting. In the end though, I managed to stay awake (and active) the whole time, and ended up in 18th place out of 44 participants. Perhaps lower than expected, but I'm not disappointed about it as I mostly went for the experience and not the results anyway. It could've been much better if I had been more careful (I had errors in 12 out of 13 rounds, almost always on puzzles with high points value after spending 20-30 minutes on them, and most of the time the errors were completely avoidable), but that's something to reflect on for next time I participate, which I definitely will!
The event itself was organized very well and I can't think of any issues that occurred, which made it all the more enjoyable. The puzzles were great too - there was a nice variety (except for way too many Easy as ABCs) within and across all the rounds in both puzzle type and difficulty, so plenty to pick from every round. I definitely had my favorite sets and not-so-favorite sets, but that's to be expected with so many puzzles.
As for the rounds, a recap:
Round 1: 510/1000 - Only got the stostone from the high pointers - it took absolutely forever to solve (who solves this type on paper anyway?), but the high point alternatives were angle loop, a binary criss-cross or triple jump, none of which I was feeling confident about. Only round without errors and got all the points I was aiming for.
Round 2: 570/1000 - One of my favorite rounds. Just lacked pace for a higher score, mostly due to spending very long on the high point cross the streams.
Round 3: 335/1000 - The round I feared the most, consisting only of (anti)knight puzzles. Surprisingly not my lowest score, which I was fully expecting it to be. Just got stuck everywhere in every puzzle I attempted.
Round 4: 405/1000 - I had a lot of puzzles marked 'skip' in the IB, but could've gotten more out of this. I spent about 30 minutes on the cipher fillomino with two restarts only for it to keep breaking at the end, and missed out on the 75 points that puzzle was worth plus whatever else I could have solved during that time.
Round 5: 500/1000 - This is where the dumb mistakes started. I finished 20 of 25 puzzles in this round, clearly going for the low pointers first. When I started the high pointers (with plenty of time left to solve at least 2), I hit a big wall in the kakuro because I had digits summing to 18 in a 15 sum and spent the rest of the round flailing around in that puzzle. Could have easily gotten 700-800 here if that didn't happen.
Round 6: 325/1000 - This was the lowest score round for many people. It just barely isn't for me, by 5 points. I had an avoidable error in the 70 point Outliar Slitherlink and had to restart 2 puzzles halfway through, so it could have been a decent round for me all things considered, but I guess everyone just struggled here.
Round 7: 320/1000 - My lowest scoring round. Two errors, one on a high point coral that I spent around 30 minutes on, which just was way too costly in the end. Although there was definitely also some fatigue here as I remember even the 10 point slash pack taking at least 3 minutes to solve.
Round 8: 535/1000 - One of my favorite rounds, loved the variety in it. 100 points of dumb errors though (scale sudoku, disambiguating two digits wrong, and minesweeper, miscounting the total mines and having one too many), so it could have been my 2nd best round.
Round 9: 415/1000 - We're after midnight now, and this round had a bad genre selection for me with a lot of weak spots (battleships, cipher puzzles, magnets). Wasted 130 points on making errors/being stuck in both kakuro, solved most of what I was targeting to solve besides that.
Round 10: 390/1000 - 130 points worth of errors in this round (30p hebi-ichigo, 70p round trip and 30p haisu), but even if I had scored those points, I would've still been disappointed as I was looking forward to this round and was hoping to solve more.
Round 11: 590/1000 - 120 points of errors here (50p kurotto, 70p all even akari). Still a decent score, but well below what was needed to be at all competitive. This was from 4.40-6.20am, which was more or less where I expected to suffer the most from fatigue, so I'm pretty happy with this score. The anglers was my favorite puzzle of the entire tournament.
Round 12: 875/1000 - By far the easiest round of the tournament with 5 finishers (round 11 had the same amount, but this felt easier as it only had vanilla puzzles, no variants). I thought I was finished too with 5 minutes left, but stupidly overlooked a puzzle which I couldn't manage to solve in the remaining time (it was worth 80 points). Also ended up having a silly error on the one or all, costing another 45 points.
Round 13: 460/1000 - The round I was least looking forward to because I felt like the genre selection didn't suit me at all. Ended up getting more points than expected, even with an error on the 80 point winners puzzle (which I solved correctly all the way to the end, where a rule I didn't realise existed disambiguated the final row. I just picked the wrong option)
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So, that's that - room for improvement, sure, but happy for a first time participation where it could've gone much, much worse. We'll see if I do better next time. For now, a big thanks to the organizers, authors and participants for making this event a big success! Looking forward to the next installment already :)
To close out this post, here are 3 practice puzzles I wrote (there wasn't really time to write any more - the yajilin was written in the hotel lobby on paper, the day before the event).
There's also an ice walk, one of the 2 puzzles I wrote while in Budapest (the other one I've already posted elsewhere). If you're coming here from puzz.link to see what I wrote about that puzzle: Hi! I hope you enjoyed reading through this post. Not much to say about the ice walk other than that it's hard but logical, and I set it on mobile in my airbnb. It shouldn't really be in this post, but whatever :^)
Aqre (Symmetry) - diff. 3/5
Penpa: https://tinyurl.com/27kdqmpy (rules in link)
Country Rail - diff. 4/5
Penpa: https://tinyurl.com/2cvxptd4 (rules in link)
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