This morning I checked out links to my website (which I do once or twice a year) and run into this thread, which made me extremly happy.
First I want to appologize for not having english language support. Actually we had the first two or three years, but after my friend (Immi) dropped almost out, it was too much load to keep it going and finally I had to decide to drop it completely. Anyway, from now on I'll try to keep a constant look at this thread, so if you have any questions I'm happy to help you here.
Thanks a lot to Chris for writting his walkthrough (it's indeed all correct there and very well done!) - I linked it from the Ü-Rätsel-page. (I'm thinking about moving this language-issues to a more prominent place, but for the time being I think this place is best.) Maybe you are interested in some of the history of the "Überraschungsrätsel" (=surprise puzzle, we often call it only Ü-Rätsel): In advent 2004 there was a surprise: A new puzzle online everyday. As this was so much fun, after the christmas-break I continued this in January 2005 and the name "surprise puzzle" sticked to it. Later in the year the highscore table was added and I-don't-know-when some extended highscore table appeard, the fore runner of the rating. Some years later I had to drop this extended table, because of memory extended problems (It was too much data). When I finally rewrite the whole code I tried to make it "better", and in February 2009 the new rating went online (which is almost, what is there now - in Autumn 2009 I made some more important changes and also invented the kyu/dan-system).
One really difficult question was the factor by which the daily puzzle changed the rating. Too low and it takes years to be at ones level to high and the rating starts to do heavy zigzag-courses. Finally I decided, that one should be at ones level about a year after starting (which means about 500 days to get ones grade correct). This looks like a long time at first, but from the experience I had before, one cannot improve this factor much without having other real drawbacks. Still, for people new to the site, there is a rating guess at the top right of "Fragen zum Rating". This shows up, when you tried at least 2 puzzles and vanishes again, when you did 300. It's not that accurate and quite often a little bit lower than your final rating, because it doesn't incorporate the fact, that you will improve your solving skills during time.
Some more pointers that you might find useful:
- uvo recorded some of his solvings and uploaded them on YouTube: e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_o4h-fR54k It's quite fun to see, at what speed he is solving the puzzles. And also you can learn there some solving techniques.
- You can find english instructions to almost all of the puzzles used in the Ü-Rätsel in the puzzle-wiki: On CrocoPuzzle-site go to "Allgemeines", "Beliebtheitsumfrage". There you can see the result of the votings of the puzzletypes. Just click the names of the puzzles to get to the corresponding wiki-page, where you find a link to the english version. There are three exceptions: ABC-Box (the latest one) and two sudoku variants (Killer and Vergleichssudoku=comparison sudoku). (Apropos: There is a slight difference between killer and Gebietssummen (area sums): In the first, in the small areas same digits are not allowed, while in the second they are.
- If you try the "Insel der Rätsel" (Island of puzzles), which is of rather gigantic size (top solvers needed about a week to get completely through) compared to everything else on the site (and rather difficult too), you can ask questions in the LM-Forumthread. A lot of people who allready solved the island are watching this thread and are willing to give you advise if needed (probably better than me, because I never solved it and meanwhile I've discarded almost all of my notes on it). You can write your questions in english, most people will understand it and noone will be upset (with maybe one exception, but well...
). (One warning: On the island, you need to decipher secret writings, where the plain text is german. Yet, people not knowing German at all, managed to do this.)
- For translating german http://dict.leo.org/ might proove helpful.
The answer to some questions chris rose in his walkthrough (or where rosen in this thread): "Rückgängig" is just German for "undo" and undoes the last larger change, that is if you cleared accidentally the wrong colour, your can undo this. You can also undo the undo itself.
It is not relevant, if you solve the puzzle at midnight or later. The rating is calculcated at midnight and recalculated in the morning at 5 o'clock of the following day (in case, someone startet shortly before midnight and took some hours to solve).
What happens with the three squares at the beginning? Before you pressed the middle square, you can safely remove the webpage without any consequences. After you pressed the middle square your result will count (a timer starts on the server). But as the timer on the server is not ideal (people with slow internet will suffer) there is a second timer in the applet which is started when pressing the right square. If you finish the puzzle, your time is send to to server and this time is used, but if your drop off and start over later, the time of the server is used instead.
As we had some people cheating (using one account to get the puzzle and solve really quickly with an other - e.g. we had someone who solved a magnets in 30 seconds where uvo needed 5 minutes), where are now some technical barriers as well as some monitoring by me (and others). One technical barrier implies, that the time between loading the webseite and starting the applet is not too much (else people can fake the applet and feed the server with wrong data). With slow connections you might run into the above mentioned "Fehler beim Starten des Applets. Bitte versuchen Sie es nochmal." (Error when starting the applet, please try again.) Try again, this should almost surely work, because this time, the applet-class-files are cached by your browser (make sure, that your browsercache is enabled), and therefore the amount of time between loading and starting gets much smaller.
Finally: After the first screenshot of the Heyawake in Chris' walkthrough, before he starts to use cyan: The square one to the right and one down of the black 2 cannot be an "X", because this would mean three consecutive areas of empty cells in that column. Therefore there has to be a black cell.
