1ACross 5th Anniversary Gridfest – Results

After a fabulous month long contest, it gives me great pleasure to announce the results of the Gridfest.

Solvers:

We had 50 participants who managed to submit at least one grid during the contest. Some could not keep up with the daily grids and on average we had 41 participants submitting the 21 grids – that’s a phenomenal 861 submissions during the period.

All-correct responses ranged from 0% for Grid 7 to 93% for Grid 14. On average 40-60% managed to submit all correct responses. Since time was not a factor in submission and since participants could solve at their own pace and time, the number of all correct entries was quite high as expected.

The enthusiasm with which participants looked forward to every grid and participated in the contest was a testimony to the high quality of the contest and especially that of all the grids that had been put together by 28 setters.

And now for the results..

Notes: * Indicates Setters. Setters were allotted their average score across all grids, for their own grids.
Strike Rate – Is a measure of the Average Score, Calculated by dividing Score / Number of Grids

The first place is Jointly awarded to Anirudh Sahni and Keith Williams. Both submitted 21 grids and made 4 errors each across all the grids. It should be noted that Keith Williams was the only participant who had zero errors in the grids itself and his errors were all on bonus questions.  Each win Amazon vouchers of INR 5,000 or equivalent in their domestic store.

The second place goes to Ratnakar Sonthi, who had a total of 5 errors across 21 grids. He wins an Amazon voucher for INR 4,000 or equivalent in his domestic store.

The third place is jointly shared by Venkatraghavan Sahasranaman, Mona Sogal and Lakshmi Prakash. They each had 6 errors across 21 grids and win Amazon vouchers for INR 2000 each.

Congrats to all the winners. What a fabulous performance by each and every one of you. Please get in touch with me with your preferred Email ID for sending out your gift vouchers and have fun shopping:)

Setters:

We originally had 31 setters who had committed 24 grids to us for the Birthday Souvenir. Due to unfortunate circumstances, two dropped out and one could not submit the grid within the original deadline. So, we went in to the Gridfest with 21 grids from 28 setters. 17 of the setters set solo grids. 3 grids were set by 3 member teams and 1 grid was a joint effort by two people.

The event required major geographical co-ordination since 16 setters are based in India, 6 are in Europe, 5 in the USA and I am based in Bahrain – nicely in the middle – which was somewhat helpful with the logistics.

Further, all the grids were not only test solved by me but most of them were also closely scrutinized by Bhalchandra Pasupathy and Ramki Krishnan, who also made a number of helpful suggestions to the setters. A big thanks to both of them who turned the grids around in record time and also gave me a lot of guidance and suggestions throughout the contest and were instrumental in running it successfully.

Although we had not really planned to run a competition with these grids and it was only supposed to be part of our Birthday Souvenir, after seeing the very high quality and variety on offer, I decided that the grids should get the attention they deserve and not just be a part of some library – mostly untouched or saved for a rainy day. So, even though the setters hadn’t actually prepared grids to compete, we decided that we would use the opportunity to survey the solvers and arrive at the three most popular grids among those who solved it. The grids were run anonymously and the Setter’s identities were not disclosed – so that the solvers could judge each grid on its own merit and not on earlier expectation.

Each solver was requested to assign 3 ratings for each grid.  Difficulty (on a scale of 1-5),  Entertainment Value (on a scale of 1-5) and Overall Quality (on a scale of 1-10). The Average scores for Entertainment Value and Quality for each grid were then converted to a COMBINED score and a final score on 100 was arrived for each grid.

And now for the results..

The first place goes to Hypatia’s Alphabet Soup (Grid 14). The second place goes to Eclogue’s “1ACross Fifth Anniversary Puzzle” (Grid 11). The third place goes to Nemo Omen’s “Nemoralia” (Grid 3).

The winners would be awarded Amazon gift vouchers for INR 10,000 (1st), INR 7,000 (2nd) and INR 3,000 (Third).

In addition, we would be sending Amazon gift vouchers of INR 3000 for each of the 21 grids that was part of the Gridfest.

Once again, please get in touch with me with your preferred Email ID for sending out your gift vouchers and have fun shopping:)

I would also like to place on record Martin DeMello’s help in standardizing the annotations. You would be seeing all the solutions and annotations in the EBook which will be out shortly.

A HUGE part of this Gridfest was Exolve – the fantastic software that has been developed by Viresh Ratnakar. Every time I use this, and I have used it a lot, I am amazed at the genius behind the software. It is extremely simple to use, very pleasant for solvers and highly customizable by the setters.

I feel blessed and humbled that Viresh has not only made this available to us but has provided amazing support every time that I have pinged him for help in using it or figuring out something. I would not be exaggerating if I say that it was only this software that gave me the conviction that the Gridfest can be done seamlessly using it and powered it efficiently.

I would also like to acknowledge all the people who have sponsored the Gridfest. The sponsors have been generous and although contributions were voluntary – they have allowed us to conduct the Gridfest in style. Here are our sponsors..

1. Venkatraghavan Sahasranaman
2. Nilesh Parmar
3. Viresh Ratnakar
4. Ashit Hegde
5. Aashwina Mouli
6. Santha Ramachandran
7. Martin DeMello
8. Steve Townsend
9. Anirudh Sahni
10. Bhalchandra Pasupathy
11. SSv Avtaar
12. Narayanan R
13. Mona Sogal
14. Madhup Tewari
15. Ratnakar Sonthi
16. Ajeesh VM
17. Manjunath Gawade
18. Amrita Majumdar
19. Venkatesan Perumal
20. N. Rengaswamy

Last but not the least, I would like to express my appreciation to all the participants who have given us much love throughout the contest. I would request each of you who participated to leave your comments on the overall experience in the blog. Also, feel free to mention any specific issues or points for improvement that we should take into account for the next edition.

The Ebook would be out in a few days and will be sent to all of you who had filled in the Gridfest registration forms. In case you haven’t done that and wish to receive a copy, please let me know.