After 9 straight years of competing (and 6 titles), this is my first year constructing for the USPC with 4 contributions from me. As such, I will hold off on much further comment until after the test. Best of luck and skill to the competitors vying for a spot on the US team. I think this year could be a wide-open race for the two positions.

This week (yes, week!) is the LMI Marathon Puzzle Test. 12 different authors have put forward bigger than usual challenges meant to be solved one at a time. I've contributed a Star Battle puzzle there, which I hope you enjoy.

Grandmaster Puzzles, my new puzzle publishing site, passed 50 puzzle prescriptions this week. If you haven't started to go there for my puzzles, what are you waiting for? Please update your links too.

I'm 74% settled in the Seattle area now, with all furniture in place and boxes slowly getting unpacked. It has been a lot of work, particularly in the middle of everything else I'm doing. Some of you may be wondering why I'd launch a large puzzle project just before moving instead of after. Well, that gets to the last bit of news.

I'm finally in TIME Magazine. Sure, I made the website before with a Philly Sudoku video story in the year of Eugune, but print for TIME is what most people will call "real". The US Team's experiences at the most recent WPC in Croatia were written up by Lev Grossman for TIME, and we've been waiting for the article for months. It looked likely at the end of December or early January (except for the Person of the Year issue) so I got my new project online as soon as I could at the high quality I wanted it to be at launch. But magazines take time, and I ended up getting 52 puzzles out before the article finally appeared. Of course I had other deadlines besides TIME, but I want to grow an audience of puzzle solvers and there are only so many ways to get free publicity these days.

I've spent at least a dozen hours in the past month arguing with people on "Corral" vs. "Cave" puzzles. It's caused a lot of stress, almost lost me one collaborator, and it continues to haunt me as others are sharing my puzzles in new settings and reviving old arguments.

I feel it is now some sort of dogmatically argued issue where there just will be no agreement between the two sides. Sure, mathematically the puzzle definitions are isomorphic, but Corral (originally "Bag" until renamed for the 2002 US Qualifying Test) is a loop puzzle, and Cave is a shading puzzle. The two just can't coexist in any solver's mind. I've found I clearly solve it as a shading style, with identical notation to most other shading styles, and therefore professionally I have chosen "Cave" as the name I use for this genre. No loops needed.

But, if "Cave" is controversial to you, we can reengage in the flame-war over here if you want. Instead I wanted to offer a gift to you, Corral fans. It seems you loopers just see the world differently. So I wanted to repackage my favorite shading puzzle style for you to better enjoy. It's a style I dare not name as you probably don't like it at all and I don't want to sour your new impression by bringing up memories of fully darkening cells or anything. But with an open mind searching for loops, I'm sure you'll love the new twist. It is a style I call "Rubber Bands."

Rules: Stretch some rubber bands over the posts in the grid, reaching vertically or horizontally only between posts. Each rubber band will surround exactly one given number, and each number in the grid will be surrounded by exactly one rubber band. The number indicates how many unit cells that rubber band surrounds. Rubber bands can touch at a post, but cannot share an edge and cannot overlap to both contain any square. Rubber bands cannot cross themselves. All internal (black) posts must either touch a rubber band or be inside a rubber band. Cells outside the rubber bands must form a single contiguous group.







I find it particularly challenging to solve Rubber Bands by just drawing the edges, but I also find particularly challenging puzzles to be very fun. So I hope you give this new style a try and solve it as the instructions intend. The new "internal post" rule is so much better than that 2x2 shaded square nonsense anyway. At least if you are being loopy.

Yesterday marked the start of an exciting Kickstarter campaign from my friend and PuzzleCraft co-author Mike Selinker.

The campaign is for The Maze of Games, a quite unusual book that is kind of like a choose your own adventure and kind of like The Fool's Errand all under one cover. I've gotten a sneak peek of the current draft and it looks to be a really incredible experience for all puzzle lovers. A truly one-of-a-kind book.

And the early Kickstarter returns have been astonishing. None of us had 4 hour and 48 minutes in the pool for how long the project would take to get funded. This doesn't mean you've missed your chance to get the book. But it does mean you now have a new responsibility to help out with The Conundrucopia, a companion project set-up for the book.

You see, sometime last month I was signing a bunch of contracts and must have missed a special provision from Mike that I be "locked in a cage" until the internet had contributed enough money to free me. But this is indeed the case. And he got a lot of other puzzlemakers too. We've each agreed to contribute a unique puzzle for The Conundrucopia, but only if enough money is raised will each puzzlemaker -- and their puzzle -- see the light of day.

I'd certainly like my puzzle to be released. In the words of Mike: "You hear that Internet? Thomas would like to get out of the cage". Reserve your copy of the Maze of Games, and support The Conundrucopia at the same time! I, and my fellow puzzlemakers, would really appreciate it!

I had a post I wanted to make after Mystery Hunt, and it was not the last one that is now at 350 comments.

As I told almost all the friends and teammates I met last weekend, my job at a biotech start-up has ended. I am soon to be performing a "soft reset" of my life by moving to Seattle in February and doing other things for awhile. Certainly, my new puzzle project Grandmaster Puzzles is one of these things, but so is running a marathon again, sleeping again, enjoying life again. The end of my 32nd year was the worst I've known. The beginning of my 33rd has been great and I hope it continues this way.

Not my tagline, but a good description for the Mystery Hunt that just happened. One line of dialogue after last year's Hunt that I led with in my wrap-up was a question of when is too soon for a Hunt to end. I said, in this era of a few competitive teams trying to grow to get over the winning hurdle, constructors aiming bigger was a mistake. The Hunt ending after 36 hours (Midnight Saturday) is fine if that makes the solving experience stretch over the weekend for everyone else. I won't comment generally on this year's effort but it seems a great example to point back to of too much ambition by too many people towards the further militarization of the size of Hunt so that by 2025 the team "The whole of new USA" can go after the coin against "USSReunited" for at least a month. The sense of "puzzle" versus "grindy work" is also a discussion I have every year and I don't choose to repeat myself. I've felt since 2008 that the Mystery Hunt is far from an event I'd regularly attend in person although I'm glad to have finally been onsite to play with Team Luck with whom I've been a "free agent" now for three years.

I had a good solving year as things go relatively, but it was mostly demoralizing personally. I soloed Palmer's Portals, for example, but spent many hours after basically solving 8/10ths with a need to tweak a very small and underconstrained set of things to get from that hard work state to a finished state. At some stage I told the team "I'm going to solve Portals and the Feynman meta and then go sleep" and I met this goal but in many times the expected time when I gave the statement. I led the solve of both Danny Ocean (with zebraboy stating the most necessary last bit to get my work over the cliff) and Richard Feynman (with Jasters). I obviously co-solved lots of the logic puzzles and other puzzles, and gave various finishing help to a range of things too. I think I did this best for "Kid Crossword" once when he had spent a lot of timing mastering the hard steps of a crossword/scrabble puzzle -- and could quite impressively fast rewrite out the set of steps I wanted him to do about the puzzle -- and the follow-up steps were not obvious but I led the killing of the beast. This was too often the feel for these puzzles, and my assassination rate was far lower than I wanted. My Sunday was spent earning 3 puzzle answers by actually going to an event, and then falsely believing the power to buy some answers would let me finish solving the Indiana Jones mini-metas -- where I had already mostly soloed Adventure 2's snakes with 5/8 answers, but then killed myself dead on #1/Ouroboros for the rest of the day for so long solving, as many solvers will say in hindsight, the puzzle that was meant to be in one of a dozen ways and not the puzzle it was. Let me state here as I did for hours with my team, the phrase "I'm not cut out for this" is horrible flavor. It implies both cut this out and, in a different way, also don't cut this out. This makes you want to cut it out, which takes a lot of time, but also to not invest too much time in cutting it out, so as to save the wasted time of doing a task you are being told not to do. Other wordings are far safer, and implied negatives within positives is one of the five worst flavor failure modes in my opinion. Puzzle editing and flavor text is an art and is certainly the biggest variable from year to year and constructing team to constructing team.

So yeah, Mystery Hunt happened. And there were the usual share of overwhelmingly incredible Aha moments. Endgame seemed very fun and I wish all teams could do just that for the weekend or at least a lot more things like that. More of that, and more sleep, would have both been some good choices this year. If only the puzzles solved on schedule.

ETA: And as I added far below around comment #300, as a solver who was both frustrated yet had fun in this Hunt, I do want to thank everyone on Sages for the incredible effort they put in. Making a Mystery Hunt is a gift for all solvers whether it matches expectations or not, and as a mostly thankless job I do want the constructors and editors and software engineers and graphic designers and cooks and phone center workers and everyone else to know I appreciated all you did over the last weekend to give us several days together for puzzling.

Further, as I was asked to write a larger piece elsewhere that has given me personally a lot more attention as the face of the criticism, and as I use the phrase "My team" a lot in general as solving forms this kind of bond, I want to be very clear: since Bombers broke up after 2009 I have been a free agent. I have solved recently with Team Luck but am not a core part of their leadership and these opinions I state are my own. I intend to form my own team next year to go after the coin again, and if you have a problem with what I have said anywhere on the internets, please hate me for it. I believe in my posts I have been offering constructive criticism, but even what I have said is without all the facts of what went on inside Sages so I could easily be speaking from ignorance a lot of the time.

EFTA: Thanks to tablesaw for pointing out this chronologic feature of posts. If you want to see all the additions to this post in time sorted order, go here http://motris.livejournal.com/181790.html?view=flat. We're on page 14 at the moment.

A few people have asked if I've stopped competing at puzzles. To minimize stress in my life, the answer for the short term is yes. I'm pouring all my free time into Grandmaster Puzzles and training to run another marathon and those two goals are big enough to fill all my time. So if you are waiting for my next LMI score, you'll have a bit of time to wait. I am constructing for the USSC and USPC this year. This also means I will not be actively competing in this year's Shinteki puzzles. I'll bet on TheDan over Projectyl this year, but the odds are pretty even.

Separately, I wrote a series of very easy puzzles for the Polish Radio station ZET which was promoting puzzles. These works are now live, and since one interesting challenge for much of my audience may be to translate the rules, I'll simply link to the Polish site with no further explanation.

At midnight, I'm officially launching my professional publishing career. In 2013, I will be doing all my puzzle posting at my new Grandmaster Puzzles blog. Many thanks to Dave Millar of The Griddle and Perplexible for help creating the site.

This livejournal will remain as my personal blog site, and will regain some of the character it has lost in recent years. It will still have some reviews of puzzle hunts and competitions, comments on life and sports, and so on. I might even make bold political statements, like "some Americans worry that allowing gays to marry will weaken traditional marriages; I think the real threat to such families will come from cheap, readily accessible (prenatal) genetic testing that will shed light on character flaws far removed from any discussion of sexuality."

But there will no longer be any weekly puzzles here. Please add or relink to my rss feed (http://www.gmpuzzles.com/blog/feed/) if you want to see my now (almost) daily puzzles.

So this, the first puzzle at the new site, will also be the last puzzle here: a Countdown to 2013 Sudoku.



Rules: Place a single digit from 1 to 9 into each cell so that no digit repeats in any row, column, or region.

After over 3 years, this will be my last "Friday Puzzle". But this will not be the last puzzle I post online. I'll be launching a new site in January 2013; watch this space for news soon.

As we end 2012, I'm reminded of my top fan list from earlier in the year after the Holiday Hunt. A couple weeks ago I had to write and publish a puzzle in ~15 minutes for my #1 fan. You'll see why I did this in time. My top fan asked for an arrow sudoku and so I'll end the year, and the Friday Puzzles on livejournal, with this rush job of a custom puzzle (that actually came out very well if hard!).

Rules:
Place a single digit from 1-9 into each cell so that no digit repeats in any row, column, or bold region. The digits along the path of each arrow must equal the digit in the circled cell; digits can repeat along an arrow provided they do not occur in the same row/column/region.

In Ask Dr. Sudoku, I share my perspective on puzzles and puzzling. If you would like to pose a question for a future Ask Dr. Sudoku, please post them here or send them to me at motris at yahoo dot com.

I'm frequently asked in interviews to identify when I first solved puzzles/sudoku. The first answer on puzzles is easy. My answer has typically been that when I was rather young (4-6), I was solving puzzles while playing Atari 800 computer games. Eventually I got into Dell magazines with Logic Problems and Cross Sums and then GAMES magazine with Paint by Numbers and Battleship puzzles, the first logic styles I really liked. Sudoku really didn't catch my attention until 2005-6.

But when it comes to my first sudoku, I've always also said that I probably solved a handful of "Number Place" puzzles a very long time ago in some Dell Math Puzzles and Logic Problems issues. This week, while near my childhood magazines, I found what is likely the very first sudoku I solved in late 1992, over 20 years ago. At the time, as I said, I was solving lots of Logic Problems and Cross Sums and this issue shows more activity on those pages. But I gave the 36-given Number Place puzzles one try, and then passed on doing any more. Dell never knew what they might have had....



So I've been solving sudoku since I was a pre-teen and am entering my third decade with the puzzle now. Another discovery going down nostalgia row with old magazines is that I actually solved more word puzzles/crosswords/etc., or at least attempted them, than I remembered as a child. Perhaps having to talk so much about sudoku has had me reinvent a past where I was unable to solve crosswords, but I was doing the "easy" ones at the same age as the "easy" Number Place puzzles.

Just as now, I went through puzzle magazine issues in slightly different ways (from the front, or by styles). Unlike now, I only have ~10-20% completion of any issue. I also found in my teen years, when I first learned of the World Puzzle Championship (WPC) from the annual reports in GAMES, that I was solving logic puzzles in pen. Those were the days. That I did not have a fax machine in the first year I wanted to try out for the WPC, and that I then forgot about the competition for 10 years until late in graduate school, is an accident in history that I still cannot fully explain.