Year-End Post???

Boy, I neglected this blog for so long. What did I do this year? In no particular order…

1 August: I made Rock, Paper, Scissors, which is probably my best game to date aesthetically. I still need to learn spriting. This one took quite a good amount of tinkering and spanned over the first half of my summer break (the entire July). Level design is hard.

31 December (yes, literally yesterday): I finished making JAM3 Game, a match-3 game that is as far away as Candy Crush Saga as I can make it. About four hours of development spanning over three or so days.

12 October: I bought Dominion. Three days later (after midterms were done), I played it with friends for the first time; people were instantly hooked. Three days later I ordered Dominion: Intrigue. Fast forward two months; on 9 December, my orders on Dominion: Seaside and Dominion: Prosperity arrived. We managed to sneak in several plays after final exams, before my friends gone back for winter break. I still hope they will get the deserved amount of plays during the next semester.

14 August: My interest on board games began, after for the first time coming to a board game store/meetup with a friend. I started browsing for board games, contemplating to buy them for a ridiculous amount of time, and bugging my friends to consider them as well. So far I’ve only thrown my money on those four, but I am indeed considering to buy some more again over this winter break.

7 November: My best relative performance on a puzzle test: Snake Variations Contest 2015, ranking 5th. If I have the time and money, I’d certainly like to actually do puzzle tests like World Puzzle Championship or 24-Hour Puzzle Championship, to actually compare myself with the world.

30 December: My provisional grades for this semester were out. I’m certainly very proud of two particular courses: Computation Theory (99.8%) and Introduction to Graph Theory (98.6%). Newfound love of graph theory. I did know I liked computation theory before taking the course, though; after all, I did have my Games are Hard page.

16 January: MIT Mystery Hunt happened. The only puzzle I made was Polyglot, but I contributed to several other puzzles; I forgot which ones. My memory is apparently terrible.

As betaveros pointed out: 9 December: I told the entire world about my kinks (might be considered NSFW).

I can’t remember other particular things I did in 2015. Oh well.

Well, good bye 2015, welcome 2016.

So it’s my birthday.

And I don’t have anything to post, anything to say… I haven’t created any puzzle to post here for several weeks. I registered on FurryMUCK, which adds something to the list of things to waste my time, and I mostly spend time browsing the net or playing SpaceChem. (On the good news, SpaceChem cleared! Except three more optional levels, which I’ll catch up some time.)

I don’t know why I procrastinate so badly… But happy birthday to myself, yay.

Did I ever say my computer broke like a month or two ago?

I think I forgot to say that here. To be precise, it started from like late January to February; fixed it by buying a new hard disk altogether on 21 February, thus having all my data lost. This includes a good amount of my puzzle images (I still work with Excel, yes, and that single worksheet went away), a good amount of Word documents (I usually have my PDFs published elsewhere, but without the Word it’s going to be some pain to rewrite them in case I want to edit–I’m too perfectionist sometimes), and other things.

Lesson: Back up.

Meanwhile, I’ll point you at this insanity. I haven’t matched that in terms of presentation (although I think I made a couple of insane variants, trying to match other works). Sooo… We’ll see if I have time to squeeze out something. Hey, I’m busy with college life + a future LMI test + Mystery Hunt + [insert other things here]…

Midterm

Midterm. The word that many people hate. A week full of study and pressure. In most colleges, midterm counts at about 25-50% of the final score, with finals counting about 40-60% and the rest are attendance/homework/quiz/etc. Failing midterm means a maximum of about B, or C if you’re unlucky enough to hit the 50% midterm course…

The midterm for me is next week, 21-25 October. Although due to my choices of courses or probably just luck, I have no midterm on the last two days, giving a nice half-week holiday :3

What will I do to prepare for the midterm?

I won’t do much, actually. I’ll just learn a little bit more than usual tests at school or quizzes here. Looking back from my quizzes, I studied for a total of zero seconds for Calculus I, also zero seconds for Biology, another zero seconds for Introduction to Programming, yet another zero seconds for Basic Korean I (which now I regret), and probably about 20 minutes for each Chemistry quiz. There’s no quiz for Physics yet, and heck, there’s no midterm for Physics. So, I plan to approximately do…

– 20 minutes of study for Calculus I, mostly to review what the definitions are.
– An hour for Biology, mostly to reminding self what things are different from what learned at school.
– 20 minutes for Introduction to Programming, mostly to toy with Python’s quirks.
– An unknown amount of time (probably 3-4 hours in total) for Basic Korean I, because I can’t do languages.
– An unknown amount of time (probably 2-3 hours in total) for Chemistry, because what the heck is Schrodinger’s equation doing in chemistry?!

I mostly plan to get enough sleep though. Even though the exams are at the end of the days (none is before 16.00, and on all days I’ll stay until 22.00), a good sleep is still good. Compare with the scenario of not enough sleep, where I might oversleep and rush to prepare myself to get to the exams…

…oh dammit it’s 25.00 here already. For the uninformed, 25.00 means 01.00 on the next day. I start to keep the time rolling continuously, only subtracting 24 hours (and advancing the day by one) every time I sleep for considerable time.

Ugh anyway. Homework…

KAIST

is the name of the university for my undergraduate study. And I’m leaving for Korea in like two hours.

Well. It was a wonderful time in Indonesia. I met a lot of friends, had a lot of experience… But now, I’m going to go to a foreign country. A completely new country that I have never gone before. Where I only know that it’s the origin of Gangnam Style and also the country of residence of the #1 osu! player Cookiezi.

Four years. Four years required to pursue my degree, hopefully less. Four years of not meeting my family and friends. But four years of meeting new friends too.

Well… It’s going to be a tough journey ahead. I’ve prepared my best; let’s hope that I can cope with it.

Good bye Indonesia, and hello Korea.

New Laptop

I have a new laptop. The previous laptop is still in service.

So, because I’m not that much into hardware, I’ll just say that it still suffices for me so far. I’m more concerned about the software.

I haven’t had time to get Microsoft Office. Either 2007 or 2010. So I’m using OpenOffice, but at the moment it looks terrible for making puzzle grids (I can’t set column width/row height in pixels argh, too lazy to keep converting from pixels to centimeters). Not to mention that I’m too used to MS Office’s ribbon menu. So don’t expect new puzzles for a while, until I get MS Office in.

Mother*****

(Before you accuse me of cursing, count the asterisks.)

Okay, so my computer seems to have a motherboard failure, since Tuesday. Which means I have had no computer access for three days, and depending on luck, I may or may not get computer access on IPC (7-9 July, aka 2 days). So…I might be solving by phone or something, depending on my mood and the eventual availability of my computer on the competition weekend. 😦

On a somewhat related note, no computer access makes me focus on solving puzzles and making them. I’ve solved Will Shortz’s Puzzlemaster Workout, with an average performance somewhere above expert time but definitely not record time (although I broke 19 record times, some of them in the “lucky” genres like Honey Islands and Boomerangs (I haven’t figured out a logical way to approach any of them, with brute force seeming to be the best method I found so far) but screwed up 5 puzzles). I’m catching up with Grandmaster Puzzles, and I might some time send some puzzles there; if I eventually send puzzles there, I already plan to send my vanilla and standard variant (is that an oxymoron?) puzzles to GMPuzzles and keep the more wicked variants for this blog. I’m making the second 7×7 Fillomino batch (the first is Fancy Fillomino February), which won’t be themed for a certain month but will be far more wicked than FFF. (Currently I’ve made Liar Cipher Fillomino and Consecutive Shikaku Fillomino, to give an idea of what puzzles I’m making. 😛 )

…alright, that’s all for now, I guess. Because it has been a long time since the last puzzle, let’s make a short one.

You have ten piles of coins, of sizes 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 (one pile each). You also have a pan. You can put any pile on the pan, but you must put all coins from the pile and no other coin from other piles. Design a sequence of piles and put the piles to the pan in that order, so that after any move, the total number of coins on the pan is not a prime number. There might be multiple sequences, but I’ve found at least one so this “puzzle” is solvable.

(An example sequence is 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, but it hits the prime 3 after two moves. Another sequence is 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, but it hits the prime 19 after two moves.)

If you found an answer, can you find one satisfying 1,_,3,_,5,_,7,_,9,_ where the underscores are to be replaced by the remaining numbers (2,4,6,8,10)?

What if you have 2013 piles whose sizes are the first 2013 positive integers instead? Can you find a way to construct the solution for any number of piles greater than or equal to 3 that always works (without trying too many possibilities of course)? (That is called a general solution.) Can you find a way to construct general solutions?

So long

…without a post. Heh. Sorry. Too many programming stuff and playing games. I didn’t even finish the solution of Puzzle 2 yet. Perhaps it will be a good activity to fill in my free time at college. 😛 I do want the solutions to be all up and running, though, so let’s just hope that I get the motivation to do it instead of procrastinating and do something else. 😛

I have a tumblr! I will post random rambles there. I think I posted this somewhere:

“tumblr to WordPress is like Twitter to Facebook in my opinion. Twitter allows short status updates while Facebook allows longer status updates; WordPress will be my place for more serious posts and tumblr will be my place for less serious posts.”

…oops that’s paraphrased from my tumblr blog which none of you should have known before this.

I’m developing my site too. Yes, yet another remake. That will also contain a lot of my projects, including but not limited to crossposting puzzles there and developing my Alternate Universe to be more documented (hence allowing it to be more complex). This blog will keep being my blog, with all puzzles being posted; then again, I haven’t figured out how to implement a blog system to my site and I’m too lazy to use WordPress.org or something. I’m still going without any money out from my pocket, save for the cost of internet.

Alright, that’s enough update for now, I think. I might be participating at Indian Puzzle Championship (obviously as an unofficial participant); the “might” is because it’s hard to estimate my availability. But with the participation window of 48 hours, I think it’s 95% guaranteed that I’ll have time. So, expect my name on the scoreboard (it’s still scoreboard even if I’m not the top 20 or so) 😛

Finals Done!

Finally. By the time this entry is up, my national exams (to be shortened to finals) should have been completed.

EDIT: There’s something very wrong if I say that the biology is moderately easy while the rest says it’s really hard.

This entry was made on Monday night.

Puzzle 55: Totally Linked Grids

Fillomino Borders, with Two Pairs added. There are four grids here. For each position in the grid (for example, the four R1C1 cells), it must be possible to divide the four numbers into two pairs, within each pair the numbers are identical. For example, it’s possible to have 1,1,2,2 or 3,3,3,3 in the four R1C1 pairs, but neither 1,2,3,4 nor 1,2,2,2.

As perceived by the author…
Difficulty: 4.0/10
Target time: 1:20

When Sky is drunk… *hic*
…erm, drunk with puzzles obviously. Anyway, when Sky is drunk by puzzles not by alcoholic stuffs, he can make extreme variations like this.

Puzzle 55: Totally Linked Grids
Fillomino Borders Two Pairs

Quite a bad response of MellowMelon’s insanely wonderful 10-genre linked puzzle, but should not be that easy to break into.

On an unrelated note, I’m going to take NTU’s entrance exam this weekend. Yay. A somewhat related note is that February is full of exams:
1,4,5,6,7,8 Feb: First mock National Exam
12,13,14 Feb: Practical exams for Indonesian and English
18,19,20,21,22,25 Feb: Second mock National Exam
26,27,28 Feb: Practical exams for the science subjects
Rawr.

On another unrelated note, 24 puzzles in my Deception’s stash ready. Still aiming for a safe 27 (so I have preview puzzles + test puzzles)…

On even another unrelated note…wait, not really. I make a goal for myself of doing Fancy Fillomino February, with 28 7×7 Fillomino puzzles, most likely with a bunch of variations you may or may not have heard. Since one of my greatest strengths is Fillomino, this should be doable if I keep myself inspired to make 28 puzzles. As of time of post (28 January), I haven’t made one. Can I prepare sufficiently many puzzles for February within 3 days so Fancy Fillomino February can start? And given that I have absurdly large amount of exams in February, can I keep making puzzles until at least I’ve prepared everything while maintaining high scores for the mock tests?

(If Fancy Fillomino February doesn’t appear, most likely I’ll post May Fillomino Mutants, in exchange to the fancy triple-F series name. Blah.)