Around here, we like our puzzles. Are there enough of them in the world to keep us all happy? Of course not! So for our September contest, you must devise an original word puzzle. By "
word puzzle"
, I mean a puzzle that can be expressed in words. Instead of working very hard to satisfy you jokers with an exhaustive definition of "
word puzzle"
, I'll just refer anyone who is interested to our
"puzzle tag" topic for its many examples. I don't know how to define "
word puzzles"
, but I know it when I see it. There is one common characteristic I will point out, however. A good word puzzle assumes only general knowledge from its participants. There are many "
puzzles"
in mathematics and science that would meet the next criterion I'm about to describe, but for our contest, let us write puzzles that some precocious grade schooler could crack given a high enough Ritalin dosage.
Here's the twist: The puzzle question should be short, yet require a long answer. Or at least the required answer should be a good deal longer than the question. An interesting thing about word puzzles is that typically the opposite is true. I spent a little time earlier coming up with a puzzle to use as an example:
A bunny starts from a square of your choosing inside a 7x8 grid. He may hop over one square in any orthogonal direction, or if that places him off-grid, move just one square in same direction. How can he visit each square once?
I wish I had time to create a more illustrative example, because it's debatable whether the question/answer length ratio is very good for my puzzle. If you wrote out your series of solving moves longhand, it certainly would be much lengthier than the question. Schik simply supplied a grid with characters indicating the sequence of moves he used to solve the puzzle, prefaced by an explanation of his system. This at first troubled me, because this answer was definitely shorter than my question. However, it seems to me that since I confined my question to plain English (no symbol systems), in all fairness, it should be evaluated against a plain English answer. If I used a symbol system, I could have made the area that the bunny needed to traverse much more complex with extra obstacles set on the grid, one-way arrows, and other convolutions. Schik didn't even know about my short-question-long-answer idea at the time, so this isn't any form of criticism towards him, but his otherwise good answer is apples to my oranges.
My puzzle still wasn't safe, because next Eytan and Masonjason described general approaches to solving the puzzle in plain English. Thankfully, both of them were longer than my question, but not dramatically so. Using a version of Eytan's tersely elegant answer, I believe it could be clearly worded in about twice the size of the original question. Read more about
the Bunny Puzzle if you are interested.
Despite the problems with my example puzzle, I think you will probably understand what I was struggling after: Ask a short question that requires a long answer.
Rules
1. Your puzzle should make some attempt at meeting the short question/long answer requirement. If your question is somewhat lengthy, but the answer is much lengthier than the question, then you are still following the principle. Let the ratio of question to answer length be your guide. Voters will be the judge of how well you've succeeded in satisfying this requirement, so I don't feel a need to make any strict rules here. Voters will be asked not to focus on specific letter or word counts, but at a more general level, how well (cleverly? enjoyably? quantitatively? philosophically?) was the requirement met.
2. Your puzzle's question and answer must be expressed in words. There is no point in providing an unnecessarily long answer to the question. The answer itself doesn't prove anything other than that you the author know some way to solve your own puzzle. Note this rule also implies that there
is a solution to your puzzle.
3. Your puzzle should be posted in reply to this topic any time after September 14th 11:59pm (23:59) Greenwich Mean Time. The post should include a correct answer inside of [secret] tags. Don't publicly post your puzzle before this time. However, I do recommend finding some people to discuss it with privately before 9/15. Puzzles often need testing and feedback to improve them.
4. You may enter as many puzzles as you wish. We will be using a rating vote so that entering more puzzles will not dilute the votes you'd receive and lessen your chances of winning. It's not a strict rule, but
please try not to post updated versions of your puzzles. Instead, post the final version of your puzzle the first time.
5. Polls will open probably 9/16 or 9/17. After voting begins, you may not post any new puzzles to be considered. Voters will be asked to give each puzzle one rating from 1 to 10 based on the following factors: meeting the short/long criterion, originality, and entertainment value. Puzzles will then be evaluated by their average rating to see who the winners are.
Prizes
First-place winner gets either an item of his choosing from
the DROD Store or a free copy of "
DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold"
after it is released. Oh, and 100 rank points.
Second-place winner gets 50 rank points.
Third-place winner gets 24 rank points...
No, just kidding--he gets 25 rank points.
A special "
participation"
bonus is given to all contestants: For each puzzles that one contestant contributed with an average rating of 7 or higher, award +1 rank points.
A special "
rookie"
bonus is given to all contestants who have never entered a DROD.net contest before and have at least one entry with an average rating of 7 or higher: +10 rank points to you, because I like fresh faces.
But I know what really motivates you sick puppies: This is your chance to be fiendishly clever and put it on display. "
Truly, your intellect is dizzying,"
they will all say.
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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twitch stream |
youtube archive (NSFW)
I'll definitely try to come up with an entry for this one.
