Newses - page 1 of 1

On Tuesday 26th, the puzzling began. Just after breakfast competitors had the 1st round, which was so called "WELCOME". Not so easy task for sleepy brains, as that round was build by 7 interconnected puzzles to be solved in 19 minutes. Very short time for this round ended with only 2 competitors finishing before the time, from whom only Andrey Bogdanov (Russia) made no mistake.

After short break there came round 2 - "Classics of WPC". Most of the puzzle types published there are well known, but the grids itselve had difficulty pushed to the limits. In this round Thomas Snyder (USA) have shown what he can by scoring 312pts, while the 2nd - Michael Ley (Germany) scored 272pts and 3rd - Hideaki Jo (Japan) - just 243pts.

Round number 3 was so called "Married". Authors of this round have put rules of few different puzzles into one diagram. It ended with "Sudokuro", "ABC of Battleships" or "Paint the Snake" compilations. This time there was no strong leader - Ulrich Voigt (Germany) won by having just 6 points more than the 2nd one - Hideaki Jo (Japan).

Round number 4 was a team round - "Anaconda". 19 small snake puzzles were put together with the aim to find a big one, going through all 19 grids - the Anaconda. No team have finished all grids, but the best team - USA - was really close finishing 17 of 19 grids. This result is really amazing, as only 2 teams (USA and Japan) have solved more than 13 puzzles!

Stay tuned - more info to come!

Best Regards,
WhyPuzzles Team

We've just fixed showing up "Your open packages" and overlapping of boxes in Solving Area.

Best Regards,
WhyPuzzles Team

We all are back home and we all finally had a good sleep. So it is time to come back in memories and write about what was going on in Paprotnia, Poland.

To those, who are not on the fly with news - from 24th to 29th October we were hosting World Puzzle Championship here, in Poland. You can find some information about that in our news here or on the WPC 2010 website.

The 1st day - the 24th was the arrival day. 105 competitors with their captains, friends and/or families came to Poland. In the evening we had welcome party. Unfortunately I was at that time on my way to the Warsaw airport and back taking 2 competitors to the hotel. But as far as I know - there was nice party that lasted to the night time.

On the next day - 25th October there was a trip for all competitors to the Warsaw and surroundings.

By the time competitors were visiting all nice places arround, we've been preparing meeting for the evening. So called "Questions and Answers". It's obligatory part of every WPC - a part, where everyone can ask every question about the upcomming puzzles, to make sure everyone knows what's to be done.

I have never thought this part of Championship can be so funny from the organiser point of view. For example - we spent like 5 or 10 minutes explaining exactly how roundabout with 4 ways comming in can or cannot be used in solution. Whats so funny? We already knew there will be no such roundabout in the final puzzle! But, of course, we couldn't tell that to the competitors.

It was of course also very important day for myself. It was the day of WhyPuzzles launching. That also led us to publish WhyPuzzles posters, that turned out to be nice way of spending time between rounds for many competitors.

Stay tuned for next parts of our WPC 2010 story comming next days!

Best Regards,
WhyPuzzles Team

Just to let all of you know - register problems should be all gone by now.

If anyway you have any problems - make sure to contact us via contact@whypuzzles.com or directly kuba@whyblack.pl

And here's some more stuff:

I think one round deserves a separate post - it's round 11 - Operation "Kuźnia".
In short - competitors were given 34 photos and a map of "Kuźnia Napoleońska Hotel" (where we lived) and its surroundings. They had to assign 30 photos to certain points on the map (some photos were additional). The competitors were not only allowed to leave competition hall, they were encouraged to do so.
At first glance it might seem that this round had very little to do with puzzles but in fact it had. The points on the map, where photos were made, were placed in order, so when somebody had done it slowly he probably would have seen the pattern.

team Germany in the foreground, Jakub Caban aka the big Mrok in white shirt on the right side

Team Hungary

The main purpose of this round was of course to have some fun and to stretch our legs:)

Tomasz Krajewski and other organizers simply enjoyed Operation Kuźnia :)

Best regards,
WhyPuzzles Team

We have heard about problems with account activations. We've activated all created accounts and are on short way to fix this issue.

Sorry for the problem and thank you for reporting it.

Best Regards,
WhyPuzzles Team

WPC 2010 finally came to an end. The competition started on Tuesday and finished on Friday. I hope everybody had a good night's sleep - I'm sure I had for the first time since the beginning of WPC :)

The most important fact is that we have a new champion. It's Taro Arimatsu from Japan. Ulrich Voigt (Germany) took the second place, Hideaki Jo third who was followed by Ko Okamoto (both Japan).
Full results are here - http://wpc2010.com/results

As you can see the Japanesse team was very strong as indiviuduals, and yet the US Team managed to take the highest prize in team competition. The second place went to Japan and third place to Germany.

USA team (in order from the left side) Palmer Mebane Roger Barkan, Wei-Hwa Huang and Thomas Snyder

In my opinion that was the most interesting round because of the emotions involved. The US team had to destroy the whole diagram because they made little mistake and couldn't repair it. Same was with team Germany.

Stay tuned for full recap,
WhyPuzzles team

1st day of competition is over. After checking all the puzzles we can say, that Thomas Snyder is a solid winner, with Ulrich Voigt and Hideaki Jo just behind. But of course there is another day and everything is subject to change.

In team competition USA wins with Japan just behind. Those teams left remaining ones behind during round 4 - Anakonda, where USA scored 765 and Japan 605, while best of the others got just 455 points.

Full results are available almost live at http://wpc2010.com/results.

We began to propagate our puzzling idea through interactive posters:

The one shown above became the point of interest for many teams. Finally China team have solved that one during dinner. But it didn't came easy:

Stay tuned for more informations, as tomorrow really interesting rounds are to come!

Best Regards,
WhyPuzzles Team

As we can read on the http://wpc2010.com (the WPC 2010 website):
"One of the main goals of the WPF is to supervise the annual World Puzzle Championship (WPC).

The first championship was held in 1992 in New York, USA. You can see a list of all past, present, and future championships via the links on the left of this page.

Official books on these championships have been published ever since 1992. These books contain reports, results and lots of puzzles. You can read about them in our section about publications.

In 2006 the WPF started supervising a yearly World Sudoku Championship (WSC) as well. The first one took place March 10 - 11, in Lucca (Italy)."

This year we are proud to host WPC in Poland. And of course our team is there:

From left to right - Michał Balcerek (michal) and Jakub Caban (Lustmored), during the questions session today.

There we can see full room of competitors closely following the answers to the puzzle rules.

And of course we are also not idle here - we came to help organize this event. It's really hot time, but we promise to do our best in providing regular news from the WPC. All organizers does their best:

Stay tuned! More info and photos to come!

Today, it is 25th October 2010, I am glad to open the WhyPuzzles portal.

Our team is right now at 19th World Puzzle Championship in Poland, from where we'll do our best to keep you informed about what's going on.

We hope you will enjoy spending time with us and hope this beta stage will help us build best puzzling community possible.

Stay tuned!