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Back home and just woke up from sleeping 13 hours. Still very tired. Can't say enough how happy I am to be back.
There are some official "results" at the W "S" "C" website, but some things are still missing. They did officially remove Maki Kaji as a listed guest. Turns out in the last week both Wayne Gould and Maki Kaji pulled out for different personal reasons. I wonder if they also managed to sense ahead of time how bad things would be as it would have been a dishonor to have them there.
Now that I can actually see the listing of finalists, I can tell you the individual qualification ranks and names of the finalists which never made my report. Jan Mrozowski was on my short-list of potential winners given his online performances before this year (he was a strong competitor who couldn't travel to Goa as well), so at least a possible contender emerged from this chaos with the "title". Still:
1st - Jan Mrozowski (POL - 4th - 231 points)
2nd - Branko Ceranic (SRB - T28th - 161 points)
3rd - Robert Babilon (CZE - 30th - 160 points)
4th - Nikola Zivanovic (SRB - 11th - 207 points)
5th - Mehmet Murat Sevim (TUR - T9th - 209 points)
6th - Sebastien Leroy (BEL - 33rd - 153 points)
7th - Ko Okamoto (JPN - 36th - 149 points)*
8th - Goran Vodopija (CRO - T28th - 161 points)
Then the official rankings list me as the best non-finalist:
9th - Thomas Snyder (USA - 1st - 265 points)*
* Ko Okamoto eliminated me in group A by submitting 3 answers at 31 points with 2+ minutes on the clock. I was 2nd in the group at the same score but without submitting. So, 36 slew 1. Of course, others then broke the tiebreaker for the open spots, but this was the group spot I should have won.
In other words, the finalists were 4,9,11,28,29,30,33,36. The average rank of a competitor after the semifinal was 22.5, 4 spots worse than the 18.5 it started at. The median at 28.5 suggests the top solvers that got through were the outliers in a long tail and not the other way around. This is a problem. Unless you believe, like our parents do, that we are all champions.
Some people on the Times (of London) comments side wonder why I would rather have them playing poker for the final as poker is a game of skill. Well, at least then everyone would have a fair shot. This set-up penalized good solvers and did not care about it at all. Harrumph. If you read that piece, you can see me in my finest. My basketball analogy was specifically for the lunacy of the format of the final puzzles (on massively large grids that some competitors struggled to even reach the top with) but it can apply to the whole thing I guess.
Some corrections since print journalists never get things right: I never had the 5:25 world "record" that was set at the Slovak National Championship last year. I was not there. I had two records on easy and very easy puzzles between 1:30-2 minutes in time that actually weren't easy/very easy enough as I can be under a minute even on a 30-31 given puzzle. Also, a Latin Square has no diagonal constraints. It is correctly mentioned that Latin Squares are not Sudoku by Tom Collyer.
At least the "championship" can be summed up by something said by the man who survived the process. Jan Mrozowski put it this way: "The last puzzle was very hard to work through logically, so I made a guess at one point. It was wrong, but I was able to go back and change it, and the answer became clear.”
Maybe Crook's method is the way to go in the future then....
There are some official "results" at the W "S" "C" website, but some things are still missing. They did officially remove Maki Kaji as a listed guest. Turns out in the last week both Wayne Gould and Maki Kaji pulled out for different personal reasons. I wonder if they also managed to sense ahead of time how bad things would be as it would have been a dishonor to have them there.
Now that I can actually see the listing of finalists, I can tell you the individual qualification ranks and names of the finalists which never made my report. Jan Mrozowski was on my short-list of potential winners given his online performances before this year (he was a strong competitor who couldn't travel to Goa as well), so at least a possible contender emerged from this chaos with the "title". Still:
1st - Jan Mrozowski (POL - 4th - 231 points)
2nd - Branko Ceranic (SRB - T28th - 161 points)
3rd - Robert Babilon (CZE - 30th - 160 points)
4th - Nikola Zivanovic (SRB - 11th - 207 points)
5th - Mehmet Murat Sevim (TUR - T9th - 209 points)
6th - Sebastien Leroy (BEL - 33rd - 153 points)
7th - Ko Okamoto (JPN - 36th - 149 points)*
8th - Goran Vodopija (CRO - T28th - 161 points)
Then the official rankings list me as the best non-finalist:
9th - Thomas Snyder (USA - 1st - 265 points)*
* Ko Okamoto eliminated me in group A by submitting 3 answers at 31 points with 2+ minutes on the clock. I was 2nd in the group at the same score but without submitting. So, 36 slew 1. Of course, others then broke the tiebreaker for the open spots, but this was the group spot I should have won.
In other words, the finalists were 4,9,11,28,29,30,33,36. The average rank of a competitor after the semifinal was 22.5, 4 spots worse than the 18.5 it started at. The median at 28.5 suggests the top solvers that got through were the outliers in a long tail and not the other way around. This is a problem. Unless you believe, like our parents do, that we are all champions.
Some people on the Times (of London) comments side wonder why I would rather have them playing poker for the final as poker is a game of skill. Well, at least then everyone would have a fair shot. This set-up penalized good solvers and did not care about it at all. Harrumph. If you read that piece, you can see me in my finest. My basketball analogy was specifically for the lunacy of the format of the final puzzles (on massively large grids that some competitors struggled to even reach the top with) but it can apply to the whole thing I guess.
Some corrections since print journalists never get things right: I never had the 5:25 world "record" that was set at the Slovak National Championship last year. I was not there. I had two records on easy and very easy puzzles between 1:30-2 minutes in time that actually weren't easy/very easy enough as I can be under a minute even on a 30-31 given puzzle. Also, a Latin Square has no diagonal constraints. It is correctly mentioned that Latin Squares are not Sudoku by Tom Collyer.
At least the "championship" can be summed up by something said by the man who survived the process. Jan Mrozowski put it this way: "The last puzzle was very hard to work through logically, so I made a guess at one point. It was wrong, but I was able to go back and change it, and the answer became clear.”
Maybe Crook's method is the way to go in the future then....
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