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Tipps & Tricks

Preparation

Make sure you read and understood the Terms of Participation. Make sure you understood how penalties are given for wrong answers as well as answers entered late, and read the tipps on this page.

Practice the procedure with the Practice that simulates the qualification completely. You will find out about technical problems early. During the contest it will probably be too late.

Download the detailed description of the puzzles in time. Read them carefully. As questions in the forum if anything remains unclear.

The qualification is about 20 pages. Make sure that your printer has enough paper and ink/toner.

Make sure that you will not be disturbed during the qualification, and that you can sit next to the computer to send solved puzzles immediately. Keep pencil and rubber at hand.

Allowed tools

Although all puzzles can be solved only with paper and pencil it might be usefull to have some other tools. Allowed are:

Reminder: The participants have to solve the puzzles on their own. Help of other persons, as well as the usage of computers, calculators, sudoku solvers, books and so on is not allowed.

Solving

After you decrypted the qualification file, print it. The puzzles are designed to be solved on paper. Not printing them will probably not spare you time. Start solving the first puzzles while the printer still prints.

The points indicate how difficult the puzzles are. The puzzles are roughly sorted by difficulty. Obviously it might be, that your estimate of the difficulty of a puzzle my differ from the one of the organizers.

Every puzzle has got an answer key that tells you, what to enter into the form. The formating of the answer is not necessarily needed. As long as your are sure, your solution is correct, will find that out somehow.

Don't guess. The penaltypoints for wrong solutions should keep you from doing so.

Enter the solutions carefully. Consider, that every participant has to do this step. Nothing is more painful, as having used a lot of time to find a correct solution and to get penalties for a wrong answer key.

You can enter your solutions immideatly when you found them into the forms. You do not need to wait until the end of the qualification where you might be in need of time. If you like, you can also send the solutions during the contest and several times. We'll combine your answers and use the last handed in solution for every puzzle.

If you want to delete a (wrong) solution, you allready sended, you can just empty the corresponding field and send the solutions again. The old solution will be deleted.

Make sure, to send your solutions in time. Late transfers will lead to penalty points. Late transfers will be evaulated benevolently. That means, when you hand in a solution that gives less points than penalty points, it will be discarded. Therefore you can without danger enter solutions after the end as long as the solutions are correct!

Relax and enjoy the qualification. You wouldn't use a saturday afternoon to solve puzzles if you had no fun doing this!