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#1: Meg Tayler (rebelcat) on Jul 4, 2007

Aww... so cute! :-)

Very cute and surprising for a 20X20 puzzle. For a reason a don't understand it took me tree time to finish it

Sweet.

Terrific job on a small puzzle.

Very cute :D

Great image, Marz. Like Qwerty (love that name!), I had to start over a couple times on this one -- you succeeded in clouding my mind! Maybe the all red (almost) made it seem easier at first blush and caught me with my guard down, but it came out really well. I'm having a hard time rating the difficulty because I don't know if its the puzzle or just me. Suggestions from the group for rating in general?

To J.C., I have the same problem with rating puzzles. When I recognize (hehe) that I'm having a brain freeze day, I have a tendency to rate a puzzle as average. I'm really hoping not to skewer the averaged rating one way or another. Perhaps it would be better if I came back to the rating a day or so later...
Discussion topic #25 was started on the subject of rating. You might want to check it out. It's nice to read your comments!

i loved it

I rate difficulty as it seems to me. Sometimes a puzzle seems hard because I didn't see something obvious and spent a lot of time struggling because of that. In other cases, it's possible that I marked a square that I really had no justification for marking, but just happened to be right about. That could make a hard puzzle seem easy.

Either way, I think you should just go ahead and rate it as you see it, and trust the average to fix any error you may make. That gives the best results in the long run. Studies indicate that averaging individual opinions, even if not all the individuals are very smart, gives remarkably good results, so long as people are arriving at their opinions independently.

If you really don't know what to say, it's probably better to not rate it than to just rate it average.

Thanks Jan. I think I will do just that. That is, wait until my brain isn't muddled if I'm having too hard of a time deciding. Your other comments were very helpful as well.

Wow, Jan, the studies you mention are pretty much the basis of our reliance of the western jury system. There is an average of about 500 years experience in the jury box, and so far it's worked fairly well.

As to rating itself, I try to not give excellent rating too easily, so that a truly exceptional puzzle does not get the same rating as one that is merely really really good. On the other hand, I tend to be gentler on ones that I might think are junk especially if it is a novice constructor. It seems that people get better the more they do, just like anything else in life (with the possible of exception of Golden Earring and Phil Collins), and I don't want to discourage them.

I tend to use comments to be encouraging to new creators, and use ratings to try to give a new solver a fair idea of what they are getting into. So my comments are sometimes rosier than my ratings, though I try to keep the dichotomy from getting TOO big.

Very good little puzzle. :-)

Excellent design! You made the best space possible of a small area.

A beautiful picture!

exellent!!!!

It's so pretty..

I solved this one on my first try but still bumped the difficulty up a notch because it took some real puzzling on my part to solve it and it's certainly not one I would've been able to solve when I first started on this site.

As far as the image goes, I gave it high marks because it's well done, easily recognizable and makes good use of positive and negative space.

And just in case you couldn't tell, I liked it.

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Ahhhhh, that was nice. Great challenge, beautiful image.

I miss good puzzles like this.

Sigh.

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Crafty creation!
Well done!

Love the puzzle! It's amazing! :)

Great image. You made great use of the white spaces.

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That is gorgeous!!

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