That's Why They Call Him . . .

For me, a lot of this weekend was logic puzzles.

The United States Puzzle Championship was last weekend, and a lot of my friends participated. I usually don't, for a lot of reasons. The biggest, of course, is that I am generally working during the time of the test. The other reason is that some of my friends (like motris and thedan) are the top solvers, so I am very aware of how far away from that level of competition I am.

But motris makes these competitions seem so enticing. I headed over to Logic Masters India, which regularly runs logic-puzzle competitions, to print out some of their past sets. Then I decided to take part in this month's Sprint Test.

I came in at 114th out of 211 submitted solutions. Which is about par for me. I've also been playing more or less daily at Croco-Puzzle, a German site that offers two timed puzzles per day, tied into a robust rating system (described by motris in this post). Your rating system runs from 0 to 3000, with 1500 representing the median solving time. After building up my ranking slowly over the course of the year, I'm starting to level off. I struggled for about a month to get a ranking above 250th, and I worked all summer to get from a rating of 1300 to 1400. My goal is to inch myself over that median.

This is, thus far, the post I planned to write. The title of this post was going to be "That's Why They Call Me the Middle of the Pack," because that's pretty solidly where I am on these puzzle competitions. It's still a pretty good showing, considering that the folks who take the time to participate in these competitions self-select to the pretty hardcore anyway.

But then, this happened:



Yup, that's me at number 1! With motris down at 17th place as "mars," and USPC and Sprint Test winner MellowMelon at 12! And that's a thirteen-second lead on #2!

It's just for today. And there's still thirteen hours for people things to change. But still, for now, I'm the leader of the pack.