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GP5

published by kiwijam on Mon, 05/11/2015 - 04:32
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Player's feedback

Thanks to the authors for the nice quality and (smaller) quantity of puzzles.

I'm wondering how long it takes Cihan to make each Crack It On with real words, I found it most difficult. I hope he has computer help, but even then it's tricky?

My small frustration was with the layout of the Cave puzzles, using white dashed lines (instead of "off-white") made it tougher for computer solvers.

Submitted by onigame on Mon, 05/11/2015 - 08:52.

Can you explain what you mean by "off-white"? I don't understand.

Also, what do you mean by computer solvers? Solvers who don't print out the puzzles but solve them on the computer screen? How could that stay competitive?

Submitted by kiwijam on Wed, 05/13/2015 - 00:19.

Sorry, I'd seen this discussed elsewhere before so didn't put much detail in here.

The issue is that when the Cave puzzle is copied into (e.g.) MS Paint, and a paintpot tool is clicked on a cell, the entire grid is flooded. This is because the cell background colour matches (half of) the dividing lines.

The usual solution to this is to have the cell backgrounds as pure white (R=100%, G=100%, B=100%), and the dividing lines to be dashed grey and "almost-white" (e.g. R=98%, G=98%, B=98%). It looks identical to the human eye, but a computer now sees it as a dividing line.

Yes, I'm referring to contestants who don't have access to a printer. I'd expect this includes a noticeable proportion of the whole GP field, but probably not those at the top of the rankings. Not everyone is entering to be competitive, some do it for fun! :)
[Personally I have a slow printer, so I like to solve something on-screen while I wait for the paper copy.]

Submitted by onigame on Fri, 05/15/2015 - 11:46.

Ah, I understand you now. Frankly it had never occurred to me that there would be solvers who would rasterize the puzzles! I will keep that in mind when laying out future rounds.