UK Puzzle Association

I suppose the circle in R4C6 is supposed to be white, not black.

Preliminary results for round 2 of the sudoku GP: 38. Freddie Hand 482 41. Sam Cappleman-Lynes 481 78. Tom Collyer 372 Tantan and Tiit well clear of the field, as well as Tomasz Skrzypczak (their first appearance in the top 3, I believe?). That was a fairly bumpy round for me so somewhat surprised w...

Yep, that’s all the standard Masyu you can do. But you know that R6C6 can’t go up and left or down and right (by normal Masyu), and going up and right will leave a cell empty, so it must go down and left.

For the first slitherlink, the 31 pattern gives two x’s and a segment. That causes some diagonal interactions. For the Masyu (all cells), after a bit of standard Masyu, consider R6C6. You should be able to determine its orientation. For the third slitherlink, the key deduction is loop avoidance; you...

I meant the classic slitherlink - I heard from some people that the first took longer than either of the other two - but come to think of it, I did struggle with the first S & W. Second one felt much easier to me.

I’d be interested to know which puzzles people had difficulty with; slitherlink 1 and 3 could have caused trouble (13 pattern/diagonal interactions) and the parity deduction in the first regional yajilin too (must be an even number of shaded cells so unclued region has one shaded). But the others se...

Yeah, this was a surprisingly tricky round. There were a few low-pointer puzzles with relatively advanced deductions, most notably the first slitherlink and regional yajilin.

I'm not sure that this is a valid argument because puzzling events are almost exclusively hand-crafted. And besides there are plenty of puzzle genres in which I have basically never seen a computer-generated puzzle.

Tip 8: make sure not to misspell words, taking particular care if they are not English. It can be a cause of much frustration!

They’re pretty inconsistent with publishing official results; sometimes they’re published by Thursday but one time they were still preliminary after two weeks! Darts is mostly just educated guessing, as Tom says. You can use certain observations to narrow down the search space (bounding, parity, etc...

I think it’s probably best to wait for official results to be published before updating the league table. Should be released by next Monday.

Thanks Tom. I suspect my lead will be short-lived (since Yanzhe was penalized for inputting the codes for 4 and 5 in the *right* order) but hoping to hang on to second. A strong showing for the UK indeed! We may be brought back down to earth by the subsequent non-numbers heavy round, but hopefully t...

Yes, I found the dissection in the example was almost completely resolvable using essentially only domino-type logic (though of course invoking the parity properties of the path). Identifying the ends of the path only comes into play later on, both of which are forced by the fact that two adjacent d...

The main issue I see is that with the anti-knight constraint there is no need for complete cluing, so the usual tricks may not be applicable. Then again it could be just be a large and fairly straightforward puzzle as you say, similar to last year’s Easy as Japanese Railway.

The instructions booklet for round 1 of the puzzle GP is our at https://gp.worldpuzzle.org/sites/default/files/Puzzles/2021/2021_PuzzleRound1_IB.pdf Looks to be a fairly unorthodox round, with a high concentration of maths/arithmetic based puzzles, around 75%. Of these the anti-knight products is cl...

That’s a pretty impressive time Sam! I was barely able to beat you with a time of 6m 45s (though I was copying out the puzzles as well as doing them :p)

It seems to me that the Puzzleduel interface is designed to be mobile-friendly to an extent - at least that would explain the rather clumsy number placement input. Though not having a mouse would certainly be a disadvantage, even if only a small one. Solving in any online interface tends to imbalanc...

I don't believe it makes a big difference at most levels unless the puzzle is solvable within 30 seconds (as many puzzles here were). Most competitions only have a couple of puzzles which are at this difficulty level. From watching Ken Endo's solving videos, I've noticed that he tends to write a fai...

My testing time for this set was about 3:29 not including puzzle 10 (as that was initially a much harder Fillomino but was substituted out for something easier). I use almost exactly the same notation as you, though I will often leave a region unnumbered if its size is no longer significant to the s...

It seems like a lot of the Stetson website is down. The puzzle palace has relocated to here: https://erich-friedman.github.io/

Preliminary results for round 8:

2. Freddie Hand 860.5
7. Neil Zussman 663.5
36. James McGowan 496

And thus, this year’s series has concluded, with the unfortunate lack of playoffs.

Preliminary final standings:

3. Freddie Hand 4678.7
11. Neil Zussman 3998.5
29. James McGowan 3533

Preliminary results for Round 7: 2. Freddie Hand 1120.7 (57:56) 19. Neil Zussman 681 37. James McGowan 608 Another frustrating loss to Ken, though understandable given the amount of time I burned on the Sudokus. Higher scores across the board as expected, with a lot of familiar genres (or because of...

Preliminary results for round 6 (EDIT: a lot of people have been awarded points for previously incorrect answers to the 159-pointer) 2. Freddie Hand 988.5 (70:27) 20. Neil Zussman 719 24. James McGowan 692 Pretty frustrating to come second with such a high score, but there were quite a few over-valu...

Welcome! Off the top of my head, I can think of Nikoli and Toketa. Both are excellent, and I would highly recommend them. There is also a huge amount of puzzle material on the web if you are willing to do a bit of searching. Obviously there is https://www.gmpuzzles.com/blog/ but there are also other...

Many thanks to Liane for organising and to the authors for an excellent set of puzzles! Congratulations to James on another UK victory. It's a little frustrating to make an error on one of the easiest puzzles in the test (namely, the four snails), especially since that was one of the puzzles I actua...