UK Puzzle Association

Thank you, Neil; that was clear, and I appreciate your time and effort on the walkthrough - both notation and reasoning were clear in context. There are 2 places for a 2 in the bottom N. I got the first sentence in practice, but that was the first bit I didn't get. Note to self: there's more of the...

detuned wrote:Out of interest, has Neil succumbed to the lure of croco yet?

Nope! I'm really not tempted, either. I spend far too much time looking at a computer screen as it is.
But congrats on all this 'Black Belt' and '2nd Dan' business, whatever it means!

Nice to see that a few of us would still be in with a shot of getting into the German squad. Y'know, if we were German and everything... Pretty pleased with my performance. Guards I can't see how to solve at all- if anyone has a logical walkthrough it would be much appreciated. As for Battleships, I...

Looks good.
Spotted a typo though: In the answer key section, it says rows should be read from right to left- I presume this should be left to right (as borne out by the answer given).

Thanks everyone for a really enjoyable weekend! Great to see lots of familiar faces, and always pleasing to see some new faces too. :) Shame it's a year until the next one. :cry: For those who weren't there, the Sudoku results were: 1st Tom Collyer, 2nd Neil Zussman, 3rd David McNeill, in an incredi...

Label rows 1-17, cols are A-Q, segments will be referred to by their top left cell. There are 3 segments entirely within cols O,P,Q, so no other stars can be in those cols. In the 3x3 areas, there must be at least 1 star on each of the top and bottom rows. This means row 4 cols H-M, row 8 cols H-M,...

I was asked for some hints for the Star Battle. Here's my entire write-up, which I'll post publicly in case it helps anyone else. I can’t remember if this is exactly how I did it, so I may have made some assumptions below that don’t quite hold. If you spot any, let me know and I’ll see if I can prov...

Looking forward to this- you know it's getting close when the booklets are published to whet your appetite! No queries yet (I've only had a quick glance through) but I'll post if I have any. Certainly looks like a lot of hard work has gone into this, as always, so thanks to those involved!

Nice to see another Neil/James duel. I see Neil doesn't like playing 2nd fiddle to anyone and upped his game a little! James - your move ;) I finished all 12 puzzles on the first weekend of the competition, then checked the leaderboard about 3 times a day for the past week to see how many people ha...

A lot of positive reviews of these puzzles, which I agree with. I think the contest is open for another day. And UK has two top-ten finishes (top-four if you exclude Japan!). In a holiday house, I solved my puzzles at the other end of the house from the computer, and because of the instant-marking ...

Thanks Ken; I agree that they had far easier questions than us- pretty much everyone who's seen it has said that, and they can't all be trying to make us feel better! Having said that, the other team did deserve to win, they were better than us, and their captain was a machine. I was a split second ...

Just want to echo what everyone else has said- it was great to see everyone who was there, I thought we had some great team camaraderie, and it was a really enjoyable week. Hope to see you all again soon! All that's left now are the memories. Well, memories and insect bites. Lots of insect bites... ...

puzzlemad wrote:We have to be patient I'm afraid.

At least that will save me from refreshing the page every hour to see the latest updates.

As others have said, there were some nice puzzles, thanks.
Is there any way to see the current results? Or do we have to be patient and wait til the end of the test?

David, you may have found this out already, but the first couple of puzzles, at least, have unique solutions without needing to know what the lettered squares (or circled squares) mean, so I presume they're something like check digits. I'd guess you could ask what digits go into the lettered squares...

No horror stories from me- if you finished above me, Magoo, you did so on merit. I just couldn't really get into the test, I spent ages and ages on a couple of puzzles and never really had any 'Aha!' moments. In short, I found it a bit of a slog. That's not to say they weren't nice puzzles, they jus...

Woah PQRST that's a blast from the past. First online comp I ever did: http://www.otuzoyun.com/pqrst/pqrst11.html. Alan beat me. :cry: And Ulrich Voigt was *only* 24th. Makes fascinating reading though, now that I recognise so many more of the names. What happened to some of those people- the top U...

Can't help much on the Yin-Yang talk, I made a small guess to get started and lots of things flowed from there. Shame I only had about 3 minutes left when I started it. James's second point is quite important though, as it can help make a lot of quick deductions. This might not be new to anyway, but...

Yes, really good performance Emma- solving Easy as ABCD and Starbattle within 45 minutes is very impressive, I gave up on the former, and struggled with the latter as well- I'm not sure I deserved 42 points more than you really.

Seconded- thanks to everyone who organised any part of the weekend for making it happen. Great to see a few familiar faces, and several new ones as well. Let's hope we continue to grow and attract an even bigger crowd next time.

Thanks Fred, some nice puzzles in there. And some frustrating ones too.
I was asked if I was as good at Sudoku as I seem to be at the other puzzles. The results of this test will give you your answer.
I did better before I had a printer.

Neil, will you PLEASE go and buy a printer!! But if I had a printer, I wouldn't have an excuse for losing to Tom S/ Palmer etc. ;) I don't think the lack of a printer affected me that much here actually. I used the work printer for some, and the rest- Tapa, Pentominoes, Graffiti, Small Regions and ...

I was at my parents house over Christmas, so I had a printer to hand for this one. ;) Very pleased to get the Penta Chess correct- I solved it, then realised I needed to work out which pentomino was which for the answer key- my Achilles heel! :o Thanks for the puzzles. :) And a Happy New Year to all...

My photos are now on facebook, though the picture quality (and photographer quality!) is pretty awful. http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.865487883794.2358448.61311175&type=1#!/media/set/?set=a.865471346934.2358445.61311175&type=1 http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.865487883794.2358448.6...

Well that certainly went better than it could have done... Thanks for all the congratulations! I'm certainly glad I was available (and selected!). The playoff didn't go particularly well, nerves and the pressure of being up against so many great puzzlers got the better of me. But I'm certainly not d...