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motris
motris
08 November 2009 @ 09:00 pm
 
Back home after a very long "day" of traveling (29 hours from leaving the hotel at 2 AM to hitting my doorstop) with a real race to the gate after a customs delay with baggage in Chicago.

The most surreal experience of this year's WPC was having other competitors pinging my blog (spotted at least 4 teams having it up at different times on their laptops) and even was asked whed I'd update as we sat in the Delphin Diva lobby. Apparently, my stories are part of their in-event experiences too and not just for the readers at home.

The hosts were good about posting score updates online where we found them first before they were printed out but this isn't always the case for all hosts (which is why I now blog all events on-site so that partial results can be found by my friends and family) and having a good online site is important for any WSC/WPC host but then so many things are and each year different ones will be missed. Even if I listed standard concerns here, I no longer hope that they will be addressed since there is not even enough agreement that Slovakia had issues to do something meaningful to codify sudoku rules and standards, not just "meet in a subcommittee" to discuss. In my opinion, the quality of a competition is often well-correlated with the amount of competitive experience of the organizers - not just puzzle-solving experience but actual competition experience. The puzzles and the puzzlers should always come first, and five hour delays because instructions were not handed out is simply not acceptable by any means to me. The solution key error and its effect on Ulrich (or whichever other solver would have gotten there first if not for him) only added onto these problems, and was another unfortunate result of not testing the format/puzzles carefully for the all-important "playoff" if you are running one. This kind of problem happened in Bulgaria as well, so its not that its a new thing and its not that it couldn't be avoided.

So, after this trip, I feel I've got lots of new puzzles ideas I want to write (can you say Tapa variations?), some "What Ifs" about competition/sudoku ideas I'd love to see here, and other energy on the construction side after seeing fun puzzles in Antalya. I am 80+% committed to writing a SudokuCup for next year's pre-WSC period (in part to cover the fact I am 80+% sure I will not be constructing for the next world tournament).

But I just do not have any energy to solve puzzles competitively at this moment. After a year with a challenging Mystery Hunt experience, the disaster that was Slovakia's world sudoku "championship" where nonsensical "rules" and unsolvable "sudoku" reigned supreme, my first discovery of the direct plagiarism of my puzzles on the French national championship just before the USPC and my first discovery of blatant cheating at the USSC that combined to destroy any sense of "innocence" puzzles might have had for me, and continued unfair and disrespectful treatment of solvers at the WPC because of the need for some kind of a "secret" playoff (foreign competitors must see WRITTEN rules and well before-hand since they do not all speak English; the documents we got certainly seemed to have been typed formally after the rounds were meant to start during the many hours of delays, and then further amended as we went on), I'm still wondering where the future of competitive puzzling will lie if I don't put on a different hat for awhile and establish standards others can't be bothered to put in place. I still await some resolution on the cheating scandal at the National Sudoku Championship and will certainly report on that here. But I'm honestly beaten down after a long year with a ton of frustration, and just need a break right now.
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Craig K.[info]canadianpuzzler on November 9th, 2009 05:28 am (UTC)
My puzzle-competition-related attention span is still booked for a few months yet, but if time permits, I'll see what I can do to help SudokuCup-wise.
motris[info]motris on November 9th, 2009 05:36 am (UTC)
Well, the next SudokuCup date is again the same weekend as the Mystery Hunt so that rules the first one out. I'd also like to continue a kind of OAPC-like thing maybe in a 24-hours style where 12 designers will each run a competition in each month of the year - I'd be able compete in 11 and write the last - maybe others could do this as well.
(Anonymous) on November 9th, 2009 10:41 am (UTC)
bloggin
thomas,

it's incredibly helpful that you openly put WPC/WSC criticism here. This gives future organisers an opportunity to learn how the events were perceived by other players. Keep it up.
(Anonymous) on November 9th, 2009 12:08 pm (UTC)
Criticisms of criticism...
I've been reading through a few of your reports from Turkey, and was struck by a couple of sarcastic and anonymous comments left in response to you.

Now from what I've read, it appears that Ulrich Voigt seems to be a valid and worthy champion. It's also obvious that there were a few "organisational issues" with the championships. To a certain extent, it appears that minor snags seem to blight any championship, and reading through some of your previous championship reports on this blog this is immediately obvious (the Prague WSC seems to be an exception here). What is also obvious - at least to my eye - is that these "organisational issues" appear to be far less volubly raised in championships you have had great personal success in. For example, the separate "classic" title in Goa, and the debut appearance of a "turned up to 11" puzzle - both very serious issues - from Goa leap to mind. The questions raised by you in response to some championships have the unfortunate affect of tainting the success of the respective winners - who it must be said are generally deserving winners.

So, whilst what you complain about may or may not be worthy of attention, there is a grave danger of it coming across (and hence subsequently dismissed) as sour grapes.

Now it is my opinion that given your experience and success, a lot of what you say is definitely worth some scrutiny, discussion and then ideally action. I understand and sympathise with your motives of setting out a list of minimum standards which would (hopefully) guarantee a quality championship - or at least to iron out a few of the above mentioned "minor snags"/"organisational issues". With all that said however, I think you need to exercise some caution with your rather direct and self-assured style of writing. Whilst it is an effective way of raising concerns and perhaps even provoking debate amongst the people that matter, you would do well to incorporate a little more balance and diplomacy in your criticism. It is not as if the people who matter are actively working to produce flawed championships.

And with *that* said, I hope my criticisms are taken with an acknowledgement of your genuine efforts and achievements in trying to progress the puzzling community,

Tom.C
motris[info]motris on November 9th, 2009 02:39 pm (UTC)
Re: Criticisms of criticism...
The Prague WSC was the cleanest in my opinion of the WSC events. The schedule was fair (a half-day at the start was also a good choice as it isolated the playoffs to be the only thing on the last day) and the puzzles - not the round structure but the puzzles - were released a month in advance. The Czechs' lead should be followed. All of their puzzles could be solved without bifurcation. However, there was no benefit to being 1st in qualification - it just defined your bracket. This was my only major criticism.

Lucca WSC was next best, and a very good championship, great instruction booklet with solvable and interesting examples still used as a reference for variants, ..., but its big mistake was in having such a long playoff schedule which, given delays, meant all the competitors missed lunch (my first food that day after a quick breakfast was a 5 scoop gelatto at 5 pm as I was nearing diabetic shock). The seven puzzle format with single eliminations also seemed to fail to reward the top solvers in day one and while Wei-Hwa and I both made the finals after being well in front of the pack in the first day, in only one case (his tie in the toroidal at 1 digit) did the "seed" matter. The press here was also given undue access to solvers during the playoffs - flash photography into eyes for example throughout the first and seventh of the playoff puzzles - and while the massive press coverage was unknown before the event, it was something to learn from in the future (which led to the "stage" finals in the next two years that isolated solvers from press and audience very well).

I absolutely detested the concept of two playoffs in Goa and I thought the "goes to 11" puzzle was completely unacceptable (as well as a couple from the earlier qualification) due to necessary bifurcation. My report the year of the event says the same and I also made such a statement in my open letter. Compared to my Prague championship won without bifurcation, I only liked the overall playoff title which had a semi-final step with a time bonus (the first and only time a WSC has actually rewarded placement) although this was ignored by the finals. The schedule of playoffs here was not revealed until the day of, as was the time bonus, etc. Again, no instructions is not acceptable. I said the same in my post trip report.

Slovakia invented far more problems than any it might have solved and can be well described elsewhere. Quickly, "bonuses" being spent by incorrect solvers, puzzles with instructions but no examples that were not clear what to do - leading to a 2x longer then normal rules meeting, rounds that stretched throughout a whole day (9 AM to midnight) to stress solvers that then were then mainly thrown away by a 36-player playoff, a 36-player playoff, with no time bonuses or other advantage of seed, not doing partial scoring of grids (as done in the playoffs at WPC) to log times of getting to a certain number of puzzles, revealing a final puzzle to the audience/solvers long before they wrote on it, a large number of puzzles that were unsolvable by logic without bifurcation (guinness record comes to mind, domino variant in team round comes to mind, many others), puzzles that were not sudoku by removing box constraints including the final puzle, no scrap paper being allowed to solvers, unclear rules for the playoffs that were never printed, including number and type of puzzles, ....

(...continued...)
motris[info]motris on November 9th, 2009 03:31 pm (UTC)
Re: Criticisms of criticism...
So, my biggest issues right now with these events are 1) that there are not clear rules almost ever, which would make a language-neutral championship possible (an addendum to this is that every year organizers seem to go out of their way to create a new kind of playoff - in what other sport/championship is structure changed this frequently?), 2) WSCs but not WPCs give no standing/seeding bonus whatsoever in the playoffs, 3) hosts of WSCs have progressively gone farther from what a "sudoku" should be in various ways, but particularly in having unsolvable classic puzzles. At this event, only (1) was triggered, but I think as a solver who does speak English it is in part my job to mention that when I am confused by what the organizers mean in a hasty meeting to talk (not read) through the rules of the rounds, that something is wrong. Given (2) is not a problem, the best solvers have the best shot in the playoffs here and deserving champions - Ulrich was by far the best again this year - ended up winning, but not without stress he did not earn or need.

I'll be the first to admit I am responsible for all the mistakes I made and my lousy showing this year and last at the WPC. If not for a successful regrade of a round in Brazil at the request of my captain, I would not have qualified as highly as I did in Brazil. My solving and making stupid errors is clear. In part, reading older reports, I sometimes feel elements are in a stage 1 - denial - part of time when I am not dealing with all the times I messed the puzzles up. But these recent and major complaints - including "Eugene" are hardly my denial of what went wrong but my inability to even begin to deal with my own failure because I am so very very angry at what I've seen. I will admit the Turks were tremendous hosts. I am perhaps being a bit overly critical of the last day of their championship given it is the first one I've been at after an angering WSC and an angering USSC and I have a very short puzzle fuse this year. But this is just a blog, and not an open letter I'm sending on. These are just my thoughts. The community can take them anyway they want. As an earlier commenter mentioned, this is how I experienced the championship - warts and all - as a solver and just this may be informative for what could be done better.
(Anonymous) on November 9th, 2009 05:58 pm (UTC)
Re: Criticisms of criticism...
It's a bit of a grey area with your blog being simply your own personal thoughts, since you are somewhat a pillar of the puzzling community and I'd happily bet your readership contains a significant proportion of it. Whilst it's ludicrous to suggest that you shouldn't be able to share your thoughts - especially when caught up in the heat of battle - I happen to think that you make an excellent "spokesman" for some "union" of solvers, and I think it'd end up being hugely detrimental for the general puzzling community if you and the organisers become increasingly estranged because I believe you have a lot to offer them. Of course the blame for this patently doesn't lie entirely with you - see my comment re that newsletter for example - and indeed my sympathies go further than that. After all, other than having an extremely successful blog, and raising sensible suggestions about issues that ought to be addressed, there is no reason that you *have* to be such a spokesman.

My calls for a little more diplomacy simply reflect your success, and how people (e.g. the Slovakian organisers - or maybe that ought to be organiser in the singular) react to your views. Like it or not, you seem to have a lot of influence!

I tried not to previously mention Zilina originally as I personally happen to agree with you 100%. Incidentally, you missed off the fact there were at least two competition puzzles with multiple solutions, and (to my own personal benefit) totally inept marking. Like you, I think it was an anomaly, but I guess it did happen, and no-one has any right to take away from Jan M.'s success.

I'd say your list of 3 points clearly and concisely summarises "organisational issues" that ought to be dealt with in a list of universal "good-championship practice" regulations (although without wanting to start a new discussion here I think there is room for some discussion with your suggestions) - and I hope that sooner or later this happens.

Tom.C
motris[info]motris on November 9th, 2009 06:00 pm (UTC)
Re: Criticisms of criticism...
There should definitely be a union of puzzle solvers that guides what the WPF does at these events. The leader of this union should hardly be me for various reasons, but I am 100% behind its creation and I've laid a groundwork for things that should be discussed.
The Dan[info]thedan on November 9th, 2009 04:14 pm (UTC)
I am, of course, appreciative of your write-ups, and as someone who is very bothered by unfairness and disorganization in competitions, I think it's very important that you take the organizers to task, which you usually do in a pretty respectful manner. As you know, I had some things to say about the USPC, but for various reasons my blog is filtered, and so I'm glad somebody makes these comments in an open forum.

I happened across the PDF of the latest WPF newsletter (available at worldpuzzle.org) and was mortified by the defensive, sarcastic tone of the Slovakian organizers, and the near-glee with which they seem to describe the defeat of the teams expected to do well. I'm putting a lot of trust in Nick to coordinate a fair and well-planned competition in Philly, and not one where the intent seems to be to "trap" unsuspecting competitors.
motris[info]motris on November 9th, 2009 04:45 pm (UTC)
When I saw this newsletter, I quickly filed it away in my luggage to never look at again.

"Those who forgot about tactics" were eliminated seems a curious way to say that the hosts ran a semi-final round with a set of "puzzles" that no one could finish and that by having the top qualifier (and many others) persist and not give up, be eliminated. Again, since its clear to show this way, the finalists were in these spots, 4, 9, 11, 28, 29, 30, 33, 36. This is a failure of selection and rules.

Would Ulrich appreciate bullshit rules letting Matus Demiger of Slovakia (36th) eliminate him because no one could solve the LOUPI and Ulrich tried? Would he appreciate having twice Matus' points and no time bonus before the puzzles played out? Would he apprectiate having 4 of 5 puzzles done but the Loupi and spending 15 minutes on it, to be eliminated by someone reaching 4 of 5 done with 1 minute left and turning in an incorrect guess for the LOUPI without any work? No, and it wouldn't happen at a WPC (at least I'd hope not). But the lack of any qualifying placement into a WSC has consistently let the potential for this happen, and my Ulrich/Matus analogy is exactly what happened for me/Okamoto Ko except I had slightly less than 2x of the points. I certainly had 15 minutes to try to solve a super guessy and unlogicable final puzzle. The proctors were telling the audience I had 3 done. So why do I get no time credit for when I had three done? Because I didn't stop and say fuck this last "sudoku"? I'm not there to not solve puzzles, "tactics" or otherwise.

I do not share your hope that trusting in Nick will get a clean WSC. I've trusted in Nick to share my thoughts to change the USSC and things have only gotten worse. The puzzles will be fine, but competition standards will be very unclear until the day of possibly. Maybe my public plan should be: I will not book flights to your event until I know all the rules of competition including the rules for the finals, puzzle identification for the finals, and format (grid size) of the finals. WSC/WPC organizers: your clock has started, as visas and affordable plane tickets can't be found in a day.
(Anonymous) on November 9th, 2009 05:23 pm (UTC)
Agree re tone of that newsletter, which I've just read. Unacceptable and unnecessarily inflammatory from what seems to be an official publication.

I'm not sure how exactly the USSC works, but I get the impression that Nick has a lot of constraints imposed by sponsors with which to work with. We certainly had an interesting correspondence with regards to how a "classics" championship ought to be run. I am confident that - what with presumably less commercial pressure - the Philly WSC will be up there with Prague in terms of organisation...

Tom.C
motris[info]motris on November 9th, 2009 06:11 pm (UTC)
However accurate some description of the differences in organization for the USSC and WSC would be for the Philadelphia team, I still do not feel there is a single person with authority who is a puzzle solver with competition experience or at the very least someone who has actively thought about the pros and cons of different formats to select a best one. That kind of person may be in the room, but without ultimate authority I make no claims to believing even my country can run a competition right.

Nick is, after all, to blame for introducing playoffs to the WPC in the first place, costing Wei-Hwa a 5th world championship after a dominating performance in Stamford in 2000. There, the scores were: Wei-Hwa Huang 1230, Neils Roest 983, Ulrich Voigt 897 which became Ulrich, Wei-Hwa, Neils after the finals. A >25% edge on top of the second place score shows to me Wei-Hwa was the best solver overall that year by far, regardless of if he was the best in a single subset of 8 puzzles in large format unlike the rest of the event. A "counting puzzle" was Wei-Hwa's undoing. To imagine my response if I was even in competitive puzzling at the time, knowing my disdain for "counting puzzles"....
nickbaxter[info]nickbaxter on November 10th, 2009 07:41 pm (UTC)
I think Thomas understands my challenges very well, and it's fair to have some skepticism.

Yes, the US opened the playoff Pandora's Box in 2000. Without having much to go on, we actually did do a few things right: gave an appropriate advantage based on the results of the prior rounds, and playoff rules were distributed as part of the advance instruction booklet. We also allowed solvers to both declare they are finished, but also check their work without any penalty.

What's perhaps forgotten about Wei-Hwa's case is that the rules gave him the opportunity to find and correct his mistake, establishing a revised completion time (that was behind Ulrich's). An alternative, a 1-minute penalty, has been used many times in finals and is arguably superior, since it tells the solver that there is in fact a mistake and for which puzzle. Had this technique been used in 2000, I'm sure that Wei-Hwa would have easily won.

In 2000, we gave the lowest ranked finalist 30 minutes, and scaled the other solving times up from that. This gave many finalists more time that we had intended. Better would have been to give the top ranked finalist a fixed amount of time (which might have been as much as 40 minutes), and then scale back everyone else from there. This would have limited (fairly) the ability of other finalists to too easily catch up.

We did not reveal the puzzle types until one hour before the playoffs. I believe the reason was for efficiency: to avoid answering questions from the 90% of the field that didn't need to know. Also, it was asserted that people would not pay so much attention if they didn't know they'd be involved, so we'd have to do another technical meeting anyhow. My feeling now is there is no good reason to withhold playoff round puzzle instructions. And ideally, the puzzle types used in playoffs should be selected from those used in the prior rounds: the playoffs shouldn't be adding anything new.

This leads to an interesting observation: in most if not all WPC playoffs, we've been allowing the solvers to correct their mistakes. But this doesn't happen in the regular rounds, where not even partial credit is given. Instead, one missed line segment can cancel out a significant amount of correct solving. What's right? Clearly where there is the opportunity to do so, organizers are saying that they want contestants to solve the puzzles correctly and will give them that opportunity. I'll assert that this doesn't happen in regular rounds because it is prohibitive to do so, and that partial credit is similarly prohibitive because each puzzle type would need its own (agreed-upon) algorithm.

So in some sense there is plausible justification (besides PR) for a playoff round--a phase where (as in real life solving) trivial mistakes are not so harshly counted against the competitors, and complete puzzle solving is emphasized.

I suppose I have to mention oversized puzzles. Yes, they happened first in 2000 as well. It is now clear that this is different from solving on a desk, as is solving online. But at the time, all we had was data from Will's crossword tournament, and believed the solving experience to be comparable. We've seen the WPC and WSC playoffs evolve away from this format, and I will work to see that this trend is maintained. My lack of definitive commitment has earned me the aforementioned skepticism, so I think I've closed the loop on this discussion!
Craig K.[info]canadianpuzzler on November 9th, 2009 05:33 pm (UTC)
Puzzle championships are - or at least should be - designed to explicitly test puzzle-solving ability, and to explicitly test nothing else. This is what the constructors construct for, and it is what the participants go to test their mettle at. Puzzle solving does require puzzle-solving tactics, but to explicitly require meta-tactics - tactics outside of the puzzle-solving tactics themselves - at a puzzle solving championship is absurd. To use the most obvious available example: even if evaporating Eugene's third place finish at the USSC were to turn out to be legal by the tournament rules, there's no way it can be considered legitimate, because it used meta-tactical ability to trump the need for puzzle-solving ability that the competition was designed to test.

All of this is not to say that there will never be meta-tactics used by individual competitors or teams for score maximization. It is simply not feasible, given the normal amount of resources for running a puzzle championship where a variety of puzzle formats are featured, to present the quantity and variety of puzzles to the normal number of competitors, over a practical span of time, in a way that will render these meta-tactics completely irrelevant. But organizers who care about the purity of their championships will do what they can within the constraints they are planning the championships under.

To admit that meta-tactics were not only helpful but required to do well in a puzzle championship is to admit that the organizers and puzzle constructors either didn't know how to organize a suitable set of championship puzzles, didn't care whether their set of puzzles was suitable, or both.
[info]scotthandelman on November 10th, 2009 03:56 am (UTC)
I for one am excited at the prospect of Tapa Variations from you. The ones in this past incarnation of the OAPC were great fun.
Mike Selinker[info]selinker on November 10th, 2009 04:10 am (UTC)
Regardless of the reasons for your intended sabbatical, I can say that taking one can be quite good. Though I've designed quite a few, I haven't competed in a multiday puzzlehunt in a year (since Ghost Patrol). I was burning out on competition, travel, and sleepless nights, and getting some distance has helped a lot. I'm still not planning to attend the Mystery Hunt, but my enthusiasm seems to be returning.

A few years ago, I dropped out of playing poker for for at least six months, because I didn't like how I was playing. I did read a lot about poker in that period, though. When I came back after my offseason, I pretty much destroyed everybody for several months after that. The break certainly helped my clarity in play.