How We’ll Choose Our Prize Winner
There’s exactly one year to go until the deadline for the Army Of Zero competition! It sounds like a long time, doesn’t it? But if the last 12 months are anything to go by, the time will rocket by and before long we’ll be selecting our winner and awarding the £1,000 prize.
We’ve been having a few people ask recently about the method that we’re going to use to pick a winner, so I thought I’d take the chance to write a blog post on the subject. It’s potentially tricky to write this post, because although we have a set of criteria for making sure that we pick a winner fairly, stating those criteria would give the answers away. So instead, I’m going for some general pointers.
First of all, apart from the closing date (30th April 2010), time isn’t a factor. The first correct solution is not necessarily going to be the winner, and there’s no advantage to getting your solution in early. A good solution sent to us this month (April 2009) will lose out to a very good solution sent to us in April 2010.
We’re looking for a single answer. The answer is more than one word, but not enough to fill a postcard.
That said, the “better” solutions are going to indicate how the answer was reached. It’s possible to get close to the final answer without solving all the puzzles. If you guess, it’s even possible to get exactly the right answer without solving all the puzzles. So we’ll be giving credit to contestants who explain where their answer came from. We’ve got a checklist of all the puzzles, and we’ll be checking each entry against that list.
How many items are on the checklist? Well, I’m not going to say exactly, partly because I don’t want to give anything away, and partly because a straight answer might actually be a bit confusing. The number of puzzles in Army Of Zero depends on how you count them: they intersect a bit, you see. If pushed, I normally tell people that there are “12 or 13″ puzzles to solve, but it’s possible to count them differently. But you will get credit for any of the items on our checklist as long as they’re included in your competition entry, no matter how you classify or group them.
