WPC 2023: 13th place! And puzzle people are real!

After solving and constructing logic puzzles for three years, I finally decided (and had the opportunity) to go to WPC (the puzzle part of the world sudoku+puzzle championship). It has been a wonderful and thrilling four days, and I aim to recap the incredible experience I had in this post.

October 18, 2023

I took a taxi from Billy Bishop airport (with a terrific view of Canada's trees in autumn) to the hotel, and I immediately got to marking my nametag:

I found many Puzzlers' club members at a large table. It was my first time meeting them all: djmathman (David Altizio) was super excited to see me, and I was just as excited to see him and everybody else (Kevin Sun, Dan Katz, Thomas Luo, Tim Miller, Yuan Yao, Walker, Victor, and more). My roommate IHNN would arrive later. Tim and Dan were both on the USA B team like me, so I made sure to greet them well. People were practicing castle walls, and I heard tluo considering buying a GMPuzzles subscription for more math path practice.

At 5 PM, Walker, Victor, and I went to a geocaching event, which I had never attended before. A Slovakian puzzle member gave us these wooden tokens, and I also have a trackable in my bag that I need to drop off somewhere.

Soon it was dinnertime-- all the meals, except maybe the breakfast which was average, were excellently prepared and buffet-style. There was an instructions meeting, where we got to ask clarifications, and were also informed that the team rounds would be on October 21 due to printing issues, and thus all the individual rounds would be on October 19 and 20. 

At the instructions meeting I bought a Toketa book which the Japanese puzzlers brought. I was very happy to have gotten one-- the puzzles are innovative and beautiful (even if sometimes bashy). It was so fun solving them on paper that I barely paid attention to the instructions meeting. And also there were stuffed animals to pet and hug!

Afterwards was a speed-setting challenge, hosted by Craig and Chiel. After hearing the prompt was Yajilin variations, I went back to my hotel room to rest and get my laptop. I didn't really do any constructing for 20 minutes, although I was thinking of what genres I could try. I thought of Yajilin + Mukkonn Enn clues, but I decided I wanted to use this construction as an opportunity to practice. So I thought of Yajilin + Exercise. My laptop had no internet, so I borrowed some graph paper from Walker and used my remaining time to come up with this abomination: 

Yajilin Exercise. You can try it out here. In case you're not familiar with Exercise, the goal is to draw a directed loop, and the loop may push a block by a space.

I came up with a breakin at the top right, and placed the clues symmetrically. It turned out to have some fun entrance counting properties. With some fiddling and given shaded blocks, I finally made the puzzle unique and sent it in. 

The ballroom was a very funny sight during the speed-setting contest. People were scattered throughout, muttering to themselves or frantically erasing. Every once in a while someone would jump out of their seat in joy or pain, followed by laughter throughout the room.

Craig transcribed the puzzles to penpa, and Chiel (as well as Wouter, and Prasanna who unfortunately couldn't attend) solved the puzzles over the next few days. We'll have to wait to find out the results.

With that, it was 11:30 PM, and tomorrow's puzzling began at 8:45 AM. So it was time for bed.

October 19

After dining with my teammates, it was time for the puzzling to begin! 

Round 1: Welcome to Canada

The first round had several varied types: TomTom, Battleships, Kurotto, Fillomino, and Yajilin. I roughly worked backwards, as I felt most comfortable with the later types. The second Yajilin and first Kurotto were great puzzles in my opinion. I solved mostly logically, using a bit of intuition and uniqueness for the scary 155 point Kurotto.

I finished those puzzles faster than I expected. On the second Battleships, I noticed the middle two columns needed 6 ship cells, but got stuck so moved on to TomTom. I bashed through the first and went back to Battleships-- I suddenly realized there was only one place to put the 4-long ship. With about 9 minutes on the clock, I knew I had a chance to finish!

It's hard to put into words how excited and tense I was. I had never finished a Puzzle GP round in my life, and here I was with a chance. My goal in this contest was to finish a round, and expected to be around 20th-30th place (considering my GP rank of 33rd).

With one puzzle left, I immediately spotted the breakin on the second TomTom, and filled in the rest of the grid as fast I could. Considering I had never finished a round before, I wasn't sure how long to check my work. I decided to just check until a new minute was about to begin (i.e. I waited until around 5m 10s on the clock). And I said "Finished!" and held up my booklet-- what a crazy feeling to have for the first time!

Outside the room I found the usual suspects, like Ken Endo and Walker who both finished in under 30 minutes. It's a little interesting how the scoring system works, as they essentially solved at a pace of over 20 pts/min, but only get 10 pts/min from the bonus. Gabi (on the USA C team) also finished, 6 minutes early! It was also a first finish for him. It was surreal to be standing outside the room, giving high-fives and discussing how the round went (quietly, of course, after I was reminded that the competition was still going :P )

Result: 650 points (out of 600)

Round 2: Jacob E. Funk

The Kakuro round. Number placement, particularly Latin squares, is my weakest area, but I can cope with Kakuro. I solved the puzzles in order as I was completely frightened by the Konkat-kuro (Dan posted a practice Konkat-kuro, and it was basically impossible and involved some tricky calculations mod 9). The first puzzle was brilliant, with a great row sum vs. column sum deduction. I finished everything but the Konkat-kuro with 3 minutes left, and decided to just check my work. In my post-solve, it turns out I could have done the Konkat-kuro in 15 minutes. I was pretty happy that the round wasn't a catastrophe for me.

Result: 310 points (out of 450)

Round 3: Niagara Falls

This round was based on Niagara Falls, with clues falling on two separate waterfalls to form two number placement puzzles. Doppelblock (also known as Smashed sums) was the one I felt most comfortable with, so I tackled that and finished it in about 15 minutes. Then I went for the Japanese sums... but I could not make progress halfway through. I started bifurcating and kept breaking each side over and over. Eventually I had a guess which solved the right-side grid, but I made a bad assumption about the left grid. I thought perhaps my solution was entirely broken and that my right-side grid was also wrong, but it miraculously was correct! It's unfortunate I spent 35 minutes for just one of the 80-point Japanese sums, but honestly the round could have been much worse.

In my postsolve, Skyscrapers (gap) took me 15 minutes, and the top heavy number place took about 25 minutes. Number placement is tough!

Result: 220 points (out of 500). Only four people finished this one; it was rough.

Round 4: The Road to GMPuzzles

The Math Path round. This was a fun one, with each Math Path having a fairly distinct solve. I had done Palmer's entire Hidato pack, so I was pretty confident-- indeed, I was able to finish with 5 minutes left! There were many finishers this round, although I'm still very happy with being able to complete all the puzzles.

Result: 450 points (out of 400)

Round 5: American Stars

After lunch and some rest (I was thankful that we had about 2 hours to eat, get some fresh air, lie on the bed hugging stuffed animals, etc.), the afternoon rounds began. This round was a bunch of Star Battles. I felt good about this as Star Battle is how I first seriously got into logic puzzles (from finding some of Thomas Snyder's video walkthroughs on them). 

The 1st and 2nd star battles posed no trouble, but I got stuck on the 3rd-- I skipped and moved on to the next ones. The star battle (builder) was very funny, and the star battle (double) had a cool breakin. Finally I was on the 110-point star battle, and I quickly spotted a breakin involving dividing two regions into 6 separate 2x2's. After finishing it, I only had 4 minutes left, so I aggressively bifurcated to finish the 3rd star battle. Overall I felt like I was solving and finding deductions very fast, and was very happy with my result! I was one of 10 finishers.

Result: 370 points (out of 350)

Round 6: North American Siblings

This was a "sextet" round, with 6 separate grids and clone regions. They were all puzzle types I felt comfortable with, thanks to all the Wittgenstein Briquets and such posted in #logic-race from Puzzlers Club. I had some silly moments where I thought the Wittgenstein Briquet and Minesweeper had both the leaf and star paired, but later found crucial logic in the Parking Lot and Battleships. I sped up near the end, finishing the star battle very quickly and resolving all the 50-50's at the end, with just one minute to spare. Again, I was ecstatic to have finished another round! 

Result: 370 points (out of 360)

Round 7: A Galaxy Far, Far Away

This round had a bunch of object placement types with myopia clues. I made several practice puzzles (https://ft029puzzles.blogspot.com/2023/10/akari-myopia.html and https://ft029puzzles.blogspot.com/2023/10/statue-park-myopia.html). It paid off! I sped through the puzzles without breaking anything. In particular for the 90-point Battleships, I found a breakin through some lookaheads in the middle quickly. Walker made some Wittgenstein Briquet (myopia)s for the US team to practice on, and it was very beneficial. Minedoku (myopia) was a bit scary as it's heavy on scanning, and I didn't do so well on it during USPC. But I was able to solve it at a steady pace, and finished with 7 minutes left. This was my best performance ever; I was tied for 3rd fastest on this, and only 5 minutes behind Ken Endo.

Result: 570 points (out of 500)

Due to finishing all the object placement rounds, I ended up being 5th place for the object placement category! That was pretty astonishing, although I always knew object placement was a strong suit for me.

Round 11: What is the Meaning of Aqre?

While handing out the Aqres for this round (or maybe it was a different round; I can't entirely remember), dj patted the stuffed octopus plushie I had on my desk. My tablemate (Oyun-Erdene from Mongolia) hadn't really said anything to me so far, but smiled when dj did that :)

This round went very well for me, as Aqre is one of my favorite genres. The 100-point Aqre was pretty fun and difficult, with a funny ending. The 130-point Aqre (symmetry) was fascinating; I used connectivity and deduced my way around the grid in a clockwise fashion. I had a whopping 11 minutes remaining! Very solid puzzles overall; thanks Jamie Hargrove for constructing.

Result: 510 points (out of 400)

Round 12: Stretching our Legs

This round had many large (around 17x17) shading puzzles. I thought it would be quite strong for me, as it seemed akin to Bachelor Seal's puzzles. I went backwards roughly, as I felt strong at Choco Banana, Heyawake, and Nurikabe. The Choco Banana was very flowy with a nice ending. The Heyawake was also a great construction; I didn't even notice during the contest that the top left and bottom right had exactly the same regions! (And same with the bottom left and top right!) I broke it but was able to fix it, and the solve was satisfying. The Nurikabe reminded me of Jamie's puzzle from USPC 2023. After getting the general idea, the details were tough, but I got through it.

The Cross the Streams was where I faltered. It didn't have as coherent a theme as the other puzzles, and I made a mistake early on. The mistake didn't affect the solve until the very end, when I couldn't satisfy a 2 clue in row 9. I finished the other puzzles and went back to this, and could not fix my error.

It turns out, I also made an unfortunate tiny error in the Nanro (signpost). I really should have checked my work instead of banging my head against the Cross the Streams.

Result: 570 points (out of 750)

Afterward was dinner, where I got to talk to many cool volunteers (like Rever, Elyot, Jamie Hargrove, etc.). Meals were definitely a really great time to socialize and meet all the wonderful members of puzzler's club in person :D

The general assembly was late in the evening. Although the agenda pdf had interesting content, the meeting itself was very boring. I just did Toketa and practiced some of Chiel's puzzles, and hoped that I could keep up my exceptional performance tomorrow.

October 20

While waiting in the line for breakfast, I found so many names I recognized. I got to talk with constructors whose work I really enjoy, like Tom Coward, as well as other competitors who I frequently see on the leaderboards. Meeting so many people would normally deplete my social battery, but they were all such cool and friendly people that it only energized me more. I ate breakfast with the US team and PC volunteers, and looked forward to the next round.

Round 13: Islands of Insight

The Islands of Insight round is based on an in-development puzzle game by Lunarch Studios. IHNN works for them as well, so gave us tips about common patterns to watch out for. I read over the tips before the round, and they came in handy! I was not fazed by the snake or shikaku-like patterns, but they were still super fun and insightful puzzles. I finished the round with 10.5 minutes left; I didn't check my solution for the 110-point one too closely, and it seemed difficult to do as it had a giant symmetric region. Not knowing what to do, I said "finished" with 10 minutes left. Meanwhile IHNN and Walker finished an astonishing 32 and 34 minutes early, respectively. 

It turned out I did have a minor error on the 110-point puzzle.

This mistake cost me 150 points in total. I didn't realize just how important it is to check my work thoroughly until this happened. Of course, I do check my work for 10-20 seconds after finishing each puzzle, but for this one in particular I played it too fast and loose.

Still, this is one of my favorite rounds of the entire contest. Each puzzle felt extremely fresh and there were many "aha moments" that felt great to discover, like in the snake-like puzzles, or the 140-point puzzle. 

Result: 650 points (out of 700)

Round 14: Melon's Puzzles

Palmer's castle wall round. I had done three of Palmer's puzzle packs in the weeks leading up to the contest, so I knew his style of logical yet brutal constructions. The round had very fun puzzles overall! The castle wall (antisymmetry) was extremely challenging. I did not find the logical breakin, so I bashed with no success with many super close non-solutions. I then did other puzzles, and after doing them, came back and bashed some more with success. With under 2 minutes left, I finally found the correct set of lines in the middle, and drew the rest of the loop quickly. That was pure adrenaline doing work for me. Later I got to appreciate the actual breakin.

Result: 400 points (out of 400)

Round 15: All Over the Map

Time for some loopy rounds! First we had a round with grids shaped like the US or Canada. The Masyu (ice) was huge but flowed well; at the end, I traced the loop to make sure I had just one loop, but kept tracing it incorrectly. I panicked and thought I needed to tweak my solution, but a few minutes later realized my left hand would cover a part of the loop while tracing it with my finger. So my solution was correct after all.

The other puzzles fared better for me, and I felt quite fast overall. Normally slitherlink is a weak spot for me, but I adapted well to the irregular grid. The California region in the rail pool was funny; I loved the numberlink and country road as well.

Result: 730 points (out of 650)

Round 16: The Breadth of America

After eating lunch and resting, I went back to the competition hall to be greeted by this round, which had some lesser-known genres by American authors. Inturnal was very fast with the shading technique (of considering vertices). Disorderly loop went a little slower for me, but they were fun solves. I moved on to Exercise, and the first two puzzles went well. Then came the 140-point Exercise. I broke in quickly, but I continuously missed an option for the loop in the top-middle. I erased and restarted over and over for about 15 minutes before realizing I should do something else. I intuited/bashed the cross border parity loops in my panic. Then I came back to the exercise, and some more erasing later, I finally resolved the top area. But I had 1 minute left. I quickly intuited half of the loop, but ran out of time. Oh well. It's very easy to miss things in Exercise.

In my postsolve, the 105-point cross border parity loop took me about 12 minutes, and I needed about 4 more minutes to finish off the Exercise.

Result: 405 points (out of 650)

Round 18: Roger's Bag

Round 18 was Roger's Bag: a bunch of caves by Roger Barkan. They were fairly challenging overall. I enjoyed the tough connectivity arguments in the 100-point cave-- I wish I could see more like that puzzle. I could not find the logic in the 115-point cave, but miraculously made two correct guesses to solve it in the last 3 minutes.

Result: 400 points (out of 400)

Round 19: Holesome Diet

The dreaded holey round. Before the round started, we were asked to make sure we had all the contents. I saw my tablemate had paperclips; I didn't find mine and asked for additional ones. It turns out, I did already have paperclips in my envelope. 

The holey fillomino involved having to find the correct order of stacking 4 different fillominos. I marked each fillomino with a letter, and used my instruction booklet as scratch paper, writing things like "B can't be on top of C" or "D is not on the bottom", etc. I was done in about 25 minutes, and then I moved on to the holey arafs. 

It took me a long time to realize I can count the number of circles in an araf. If there are an odd number of circles, it can't be on the bottom layer: it needs to be on top of another araf to fix the parity. I had enough time to finish 2 arafs. With 1 minute left I made a mad dash to intuit a third araf, and I was actually very close to finishing-- but not quite. I needed another minute to count the huge regions of area 15 and 18.

Postsolving the final araf took me about 5 minutes. I probably should have tackled the arafs first, then the fillominos, as they were worth 70 points each instead of 40.

Result: 300 points (out of 440)

Round 20: Pentominous+

This round was many pentominous variations, all written by Grant Fikes. I worked quite fast this round, with my pencil rarely being still, as the grids were quite large (5 pairs of 10x10 and 15x15). The star battle part of the large pentominous + star battle was fine for me, but I had to do some long lookaheads for the middle area. (The construction is quite impressive, with such an empty middle.) The large pentominous + spiral galaxies was challenging, but after breaking in, it flowed well. The rest of the round went quite fast for me; I had practice from the GMPuzzles blog, and I had an idea of what the round would be because of the pentominous + skyscrapers from USPC 2023. I finished with 4 minutes to spare.

My grader, Rever, gave me an :umbreoncheer: !

Result: 640 points (out of 600). I had the 5th best score in this round!

Round 10: Words CAN Define US

The word round was saved for last. The wordle banks were surprisingly logical and fun! I then did the "one or two" crossword by looking for rare letters like W and Y. I heard other people broke in with INSTALLMENT or UNEMOTIONAL. 

Then I solved the crisscross crash, which was fun and featured the word YURT. I began by listing all the starting and ending letters; the breakin was clear once I saw the 10 A's!

AAAAAAAAAA

At this point I had about 20 minutes left, and thought I would do best on the crisscross. This was a pretty bad mistake. I spent the entire time on it, slow and steady. I finished only with a few seconds left and could not check my answers.

The grader marked it correct, but when I saw the actual solution, I immediately noticed I spelled "ITIMAK" with a Q at the end instead. Very minor error, but I felt bad and asked the graders. They took off my 100 points (rightfully so), and Thomas Snyder himself confirmed to me that every letter must be correct for full credit.

In my postsolve, the scrabble took me 11 minutes, and the word search 8 minutes. So I could have done those for 165 extra points. Oh well-- next time a contest like this appears, I should know that crisscross isn't my strength.

Result: 235 points (out of 500)

The end of the individual rounds

And with that, all the individual rounds were over! Not all the tests were graded yet, but I was around 14th place which I felt fantastic about!

After a tasty dinner, it was time to watch the GP finals. Shockingly, Cai Ji and Walker Anderson went from very high ranks to somewhere around 12th-16th in the online stage. The swiss elimination format really does not make sense when trying to rank contestants, but I guess it adds more excitement as literally anything can happen. Although, one constant is that Ken Endo will be at the top.

The audience got printouts of the live playoff puzzles, so I was able to race them. My times were: 3:01 on Markus Roth's cave (which was slightly slow compared to the contestants); 2:47 on Deyan Razsadov's pentominous (which was fast, only beaten by IHNN with something like a 2:12); and 3:31 on Gabriele Penn-Karras' kakuro (which was slightly slower than most of the live contestants, and much slower than Kota and Ken). I also got a 4:41 on the irregular slitherlink but that wasn't used.

Overall, the kakuro was definitely my favorite-- it had some really cool logic all around. And it was amazing seeing so many great puzzlers all together!

October 21

The team rounds thankfully were printed and functional. 

Round 8: Aha Moments

The day began with an instructionless round. Dan and I were on a sub-team, with Wei-Hwa and Tim on the other. They figured out their instructions (about a word search and latin square) fast, and moved on to the meta. Dan and I were slower; I had a drawing puzzle with a no loops constraint which I figured out quickly. Dan's was more strange, and it took us a while to realize that there will be 1 empty cell in the pipelink-esque genre. We weren't sure why the walls were tilted though.

Then in the meta, Wei-Hwa and Tim had already figured out the 3x3 Latin square, and I verified there were no loops. So it was just simple loop time, and #logic-race prepared me well for that. We spent several minutes double-checking our work since we were unsure what the missing words at the top of the page were for, and finally turned it in with a 12 minute bonus.

When this round was graded, we got a 900/1800. Oh no! But it turns out the grader didn't understand the border we drew around the 3x3 was just for notational purposes, so our protest brought us up to 2280 points!

Round 9: Red and Blue

The wacky Neon Knetwork round. Tim was quite fast as he does competitive jigsaw puzzling, and that definitely helped with identifying pieces quickly. I was slower but more meticulous with my shading. It was a pretty entertaining and interesting round, and we finished with 10 minutes to spare, which was only slower than Germany-A which had a blazing 21 minutes remaining.

Round 17: Canadian Summits

This round had some Fuzulis to piece together. Wei-Hwa and Tim were mainly focused on assembling the puzzles; Dan and I focused on solving. It took a long time to find the right combinations, but eventually we used the central 8 to our advantage, and solving the Fuzulis was not too difficult.

Funnily enough, USA's D-team obliterated the round with 15 minutes left. C-team had 7 minutes left; B-team and A-team had 5 minutes left. Congrats to D-team for working together really efficiently!

Then it was time for a lunch break as well as a team photo. After some socializing and relaxing, it was time for...

Round 21: Trick or Treat

This round was one of my favorites! We split up the 9 puzzles; I felt strong at Statue Park and Non-consecutive Fillomino and took those. I ended up solving the Country Road as well. My teammates were generally strong at number placement and words, so they took the other puzzles. 

The non-consecutive Fillomino was very tough; Tim and I both worked on it for quite a while independently, but kept breaking it. Then we worked together, and explaining our logic step by step, was able to find our wrong assumption and solve it. Teamwork!

We also figured out how the treats worked-- each puzzle had to be modified with an encoding scheme (such as braille, ternary, making a puzzle smaller, etc.) Not only was this extremely impressive, but it was super fun to figure out each puzzle's mechanism.

Although, in the middle of the round an argument broke out. Tim had already tried squaring and cubing the numbers in the observation puzzle, and Wei-Hwa was trying to do it as well. Tim kept telling Wei-Hwa to stop trying to do the same thing, but Wei-Hwa didn't understand what was attempted before. If our team wanted any chance of finishing, this bickering had to cease; Dan tried to calm them down to no avail. 

To get organized, I made a list of all the puzzles we had done so far (7 tricks), and to stop them from arguing further, I gave them specific tasks to do. Tim would continue working on one of the treats, and I would solve the Cave together with Wei-Hwa. This ended up being quite successful! There wasn't any arguing from that point onward, and I was very happy about that.

Few teams were finishing, so the round was extended. We solved until getting 9 tricks and 7 treats. Wei-Hwa understood the meta, which cleverly used the wrapping paper of each candy as well as SI prefixes. I tried solving it and left the word puzzle to Dan and Tim. Our guesses did not work out when the round ended. Still, I was blown away by the cleverness of this round. I also had great fun running around the room making animal noises at each of the trick-or-treat houses. Energy, puzzle quality, and creativity were all through the roof with this round! It felt like a perfect mashup of logic puzzles with mechanics from hunt puzzles.

Round 22: Ceremonial Folding

I was not looking forward to Ceremonial Folding, as I never understood origami well. But, I found myself a job: creasing papers and doing logistics. I made a giant chart showing what pieces were necessary to make each. Using this it was a short amount of casework to prove that our construction of Mail, Lock, No Smoking was optimal. Although there is no bonus for turning it in early, we had triple-checked our work with 10 minutes left and just let the volunteers judge our solution. Most teams got either 1540 or 1430 points. 

The Chart™

Mini-playoffs

With that, I was done puzzling! Ceremonial folding was a nice wind-down from the intensity of Trick or Treat. But now I was excited to watch the mini-playoffs! The top three (who all happened to be A-team members) of each genre would try to solve puzzles on giant easels as quickly as they could.

First up was number placement (I was 44th... definitely my weakest area), with SuZhe Qiu, Ken Endo, and Kota Morinishi. SuZhe was unfortunately stumped by the TomTom (admittedly, as a spectator, I could not figure out a breakin either). Kota won the playoff, showing his great Kakuro skills.

Next was object placement (which I was 5th for!). This time the contestants were Ken, Walker Anderson, and Kota. It was a close battle, but Ken's notation is just blazing fast (for example, he would draw a big circle around a battleship to indicate no ship pieces are there). Walker was also quite fast and finished second.

Then it was time for shading (I was 14th). Ken, Walker, and Jeffrey Bardon were on the stage. This was a fantastic playoff! Ken "finished" solving, noticed an error on the top left, and fixed it. But he didn't fill in a region on the bottom right! Elyot gestured 🙅, and shortly afterwards, Jeffrey also finished, noticing the region on the bottom-right just before turning in the answer! It was hard not to share the pure disbelief and joy that Jeffrey felt, as it was his first time competing at WPC!

Next up was loops (I was 15th). Ken, Thomas Luo, and Naoki Sekiya were on stage, with some intimidating genres: castle wall, a slitherlink shaped like a trophy, and a cross parity border loop. The cross parity border loop stumped Ken and Thomas (I think Thomas misread some numbers unfortunately), and Naoki secured the win!

The final playoff was region division (I was 11th). Familiar names were at the easels: Ken, Walker, and Thomas. It was fascinating seeing the disparity between Ken and Walker: Ken's notation was sloppy and rushed, while Walker was very neat while going even faster than Ken. The deciding factor was Araf, which Ken and Thomas took too long to find the breakin for.

An extremely rare sight: Ken stumped by a puzzle

Walker was able to figure out the Araf and won first place! All the playoffs were so exciting to watch, and I'm glad I could witness these top puzzlers' thinking process and pure speed.

Closing Ceremony

Now the rounds were all graded. As explained above, I anti-protested (con-tested?) my word search round. But, it turns out Yuki Kawabe's score also dropped. But those details don't truly matter-- I got 13th place at my first WPC!!! That means I beat out many familiar names from GP like Martin Merker, Hideaki Jo, Neil Zussman, etc. who are usually always above me in GP. 

I can't overstate just how crazy of a performance this was for me. I'm not sure whether I had super good days, or whether I'm better at in-person solving (e.g. don't need to input answers, and don't need to deal with the quirks of iPad solving), or the practice I did in the weeks leading up to the event, or that my style of logical solving suits well with the authors of this year's contest. In truth it's probably a combination of all the above.

I was acknowledged for being the 2nd best newcomer to WPC (along with Yuan Yao, and of course Jeffrey Bardon who was the best newcomer). I was truly happy with how far I've come in puzzling-- just three years ago, I was about ten times slower than everybody else in #logic-race. Now I'm standing among some of the world's best solvers. And, of course, there's always room for improvement-- there's still a gulf between me and solvers like Ken and Walker :)

After clapping my hands sore from cheering for everybody who placed in the top 3, it was time for Chiel to announce the winners of the speed-setting contest. 3rd place was Mark Sweep's tapa-like + yajilin; 2nd place was Dan Katz's math path yajilin. I was in pure shock when he announced I had won the contest with my yajilin + exercise!

The prize! Don't mind my bandage over a papercut.

I won a Nikoli book full of classic genres like numberlink and choco banana! My days of setting puzzles while waiting in line for food at university have paid off.

(Although, when I got home, I wanted to share my puzzle and made a penpa link. While doing so, Kays, a member from puzzler's club, posted some screenshots which made me realize there was an alternate solution! So somehow my broken puzzle won first place. I think I've fixed it now, but I hope I can pay Chiel back somehow next time we meet.)

Around this time the entire puzzler's club cohort (missing a few people like mstang who fell asleep :dismay: ) gathered for a group photo! It was great seeing the regular chatters as well as lurkers all together and having fun.

Karaoke, aka all the nerds sit in the back playing Islands of Insight

I know little pop culture, although every once in a while I'd admire the karaoke going on (e.g. Kota singing "What do you mean"). But for the most part I was watching people play Islands of Insight!

Islands of Insight isn't just grid logic, there's really clever sliding block games and much much more!

I was there watching Islands of Insight gameplay from about 9 PM to 2 AM. Of course I took some breaks, including one where a spontaneous "take a photo, and then join the crowd" event happened. I also got to play the game for a little bit as well, solving a 3-star grid. Overall I had a lovely time talking to all my friends about the gameplay and puzzles in general. It's insane just how many crazy and clever ideas the developers (many of which were sitting right next to me!) could shove into this game.

October 22

I woke up early for free breakfast, and got to talk to Rever and dj for a bit. Afterward I hanged out in the lobby, where lots of people were chilling and socializing. Even Thomas Snyder was there, sharing insights about how the event was organized, and the increased security presence due to celebrities like Jason Zuffranieri (in the puzzle/quizzing world, I guess... and I don't know whether he was joking or serious). I spent the time talking and doing more toketa puzzles. 

Kevin Sun was going around having people solve and sign each sudoku in his The Art of Sudoku book. When it came to me, I picked one that looked cool: it had numbers in the shape of two S's. Maybe subconsciously I had recognized it, but this was on the back cover! It took me a long time to solve, but it was satisfying and had neat deductions in the center. Thomas was watching me and giving the backstory of how he constructed it 10 years ago, dividing the odds and the evens with the number 5 as a bridge.

And finally, my tablemate Oyun-Erdene came to say hi. She brought me some toys from Mongolia as a gift <3 It was very sweet, and I wish I had something to give as well. Add that to the list of things I'll bring for next time.

Just like that, it was time to say goodbye. I hugged lots of different people! (except Jamie, as he was sick, but he deserves hugs for all his fantastic constructions in the contest.) I got one last glance at the bright red and orange autumn leaves on the car ride.

That's it for my puzzling experience at WPC. It's an understatement to say I performed beyond my expectations by getting 13th place. And more importantly, I had a blast meeting and getting to know all the friends I recognized from online (and making new friends!).

A building I saw on my car ride home. I'll probably see many people again on the LMI leaderboards when Puzzle Ramayan begins in a few months :)