Puzzle GP (last edited for 2023)

Tournament Format

The WPF Puzzle GP is an 8-round tournament, with one round held every four weeks, with a playoff round held at the World Puzzle Championships. The puzzles will be released in PDF format; it is expected that participants will print out the PDF locally, solve the puzzles on paper, and submit answers online that illustrate that they have solved the puzzles correctly.

On the Friday of the round, 12:00:00 (GMT +1 hours), the puzzles become available to each participant. The participant has 90 minutes to submit the correct answers to as many puzzles as they can. The competition officially ends on the following Monday, at 23:59:59 (GMT +1 hours). No solutions submitted after the end of the competition will be accepted, even if the competitor started the round later than 22:29:59. Occasionally, the schedule may change due to unforeseen circumstances; the director will endeavor to make sure all such changes are fair and announced.

Participants

Puzzle Types

Each round will consist of a variety of puzzles, of different difficulties. The following guidelines have been provided to each round’s authors and the director will try their best to edit the puzzles to conform.

At least 2 of the puzzles should be understandable and solvable to a general audience. The rules to the puzzles are generally not complicated and can be understood by almost anybody. It is possible for these puzzles to require some bit of external knowledge (such as simple English vocabulary, world facts, etc.) or be culturally advantageous to some players (knowledge of letter frequency distributions, familiarity with the Latin alphabet, aware of “aha” trick questions, etc.) If a puzzle requires external knowledge, generally this will be described in the instructions.

At least 30% of the puzzles should be from the 70 or so most commonly-encountered “WPC-style” puzzle types. These puzzle types are usually called “classics” or “evergreens” at the World Puzzle Championship. The puzzles are usually on a grid and require the solver to write information in the grid subject to given information and logical constraints. The rules for the puzzle types will be familiar to most WPC veteran competitors.

The rest of the competition puzzles will be types that a competitor might encounter at a modern World Puzzle Championship (“WPC-style”). The puzzles are usually on a grid and require the solver to write information in the grid subject to given information and logical constraints. They can often consist of new types or new variations.

The puzzles in each round will roughly be ordered in this order, and roughly ordered by difficulty.

A list of examples of most previous puzzle types and their instructions can be found in the WPF GP Puzzle archive.

External Aids

The participants must solve the puzzles by themselves.

The following aids are not allowed:

• other people
• calculators
• solving programs (including those written by the participant)
• reference materials for trivia (encyclopedias, search engines, code sheets)

The following aids are not allowed unless explicitly allowed by a specific puzzle:

• scissors
• tape
• compass
• rulers

A translation dictionary, for the sole purpose of translating instructions and rules to the participant’s native language, is permitted, but it may not be used to solve puzzles.

This list of aids is not intended to be complete. In case of doubt as to whether an aid is permissible, please contact the contest organizers.

Eligibility

Only WPF solvers with a registered account on www.gp.worldpuzzle.org can participate.  Registration is free, but you must provide a valid e-mail address, name, and country.

Submitting Answers

Each puzzle has one intended correct solution.  Since the solution is often difficult to enter into an online form, the participant will be given instructions to derive one or more answers from their solution.  The method of deriving an answer is given in the instructions, and is also illustrated in the puzzle’s examples.  This step is not intended to be tricky or puzzle-like; if the process is unclear or ambiguous, please send a request for help to the organizers at puzzlegp@worldpuzzle.com.
To get credit for solving a puzzle correctly, the participant must enter the correct answer(s) into the on-line form and then submit the form.  It is possible to submit the correct answer while having a mistake in one’s solution; however, the answers are usually chosen so that this is unlikely to happen by random chance.  It is also possible to submit an incorrect answer despite having the correct solution; the participant will not get credit for such puzzles except in extreme circumstances, so please be sure you understand the answer derivation rules correctly!
If the participant submits multiple times, only the last submission within the tournament time limit will be scored (although the judges reserve the right to look at previous submissions for adjudicate claims of computer failure or other irregularities).

The participant’s score for the round is the sum of the point values of all puzzles with correct answers, with any adjustments as listed below:

Penalty Adjustment for Wrong Answers: An incorrect answer scores the same as an answer left blank.  

Time Bonus for Finishing Early: All rounds are eligible for time bonuses if the participant solves them before the end of the 60-minute time period. When the participant believes that they have solved all the puzzles, they may click on the “Claim Bonus” button. After clicking on the button, the participant may no longer submit any answers to puzzles.