UK Puzzle Association

Following my disaster at the 2008 Times championship - Simon A wonderfully described it: ...And about 10 minutes later Tom was still working - I could see him frantically rubbish things out and, at one point, the tell tale movements of a man drawing a new grid could be discerned... I do any offline ...

Wasn't Michael Jordan a basketball player? :P I don't think there has been too much discussion of scores to be honest. In threads whose subject is to do with a puzzle specific competition I think discussing scores made in that contest is fair game. Equally in these threads, there has been a fair amo...

I wasted time on number pyramid too during the contest too, but this was primarily because I didn't read the condition on the bottom row having no repeated digits. After the test, it took a bit of playing to find the correct configuration on the bottom, but with that in place it fell fairly quickly....

This is happening on the 18th of September, in the Institute of Education London, near Russell Square.

Although all the qualifying for this has long been and gone, I was just interested to see whether anyone else on this forum is going to be there.

Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed this test - not so much during the 80 minutes, when I was half asleep and stressed, but more so afterwards as I worked my way through the puzzles at my leisure. I managed to solve 'Not 4 in a row' almost entirely by assuming the uniqueness of the solution, so t...

From my perspective, the annoyance with my score was mainly from throwing way over half of it away. I think my self-kicking here is entirely justified. I also think that rating your own score is entirely relative to where you think you ought to be. In that respect I think that it's a good thing that...

I went back and had a go at this today. I found points and time spent on puzzles weren't greatly correlated (the samurai sudoku in particular was very easy) although some of the ideas were novel, and I found myself playing around "feeling" for solutions as opposed to making cold hard logical deducti...

Wow yeah, I bet that's a total that'll probs be top 20, maybe even 10 - great effort!

Or not. 4 dickhead errors in entry keys (+1 genuine mistake), and 3 puzzles I simply neglected to enter. Brought me down from 282 to a pitiful 135. What with the footy too, not been a great day :\

Should this be in the announcements forum too?

I hear the puzzles in this one are going to be rather good

I look forward to gaining a bit of redemption with this one

If we count WSC's too, the benchmarks are a little higher - but why not aim high?

Individual: 4th (McNeill, 2007)
Team: 6th (Collyer, Danker and McNeill, 2010)

Good luck to Steve, Gareth, Ronald and Simon. I'm happy to start throwing together some practice material if people are interested?

drsteve wrote:
This looks great, but I'll be away this weekend. I'll definitely have a go next week sometime. Looks like a lot of fun. Hope it goes well

Ditto!

Hurrah! Finally did that swearwordy Sudoku! 16 minutes, with the advantage of knowing where to at least start from last time. So, as there are Sudoku experts out there - is there a good resource for advanced Sudoku strategy out there? I know part of my trouble is just missing things (like, occasion...

Thanks for the heads up deb. My laptop is in for repairs and my efficiency in scouring the internets for puzzle competitions has been somewhat reduced. This means of course that I'm not totally sure as to whether I can compete in this or not

Having completed all the puzzles, even more self-kicking. However I'm pleased to say that I appear to have gotten my "full" 110 points, which is a little consolation bearing in mind my general "rabbit in headlights" performance. X-agony was an absolute brute. I'd be very interested in seeing a pleas...

Thanks for the heads up on this

Ouch - 110 here. I got the sudoku :) It was a much better puzzle than they used for the time trial yesterday. otherwise kept messing up lots of puzzles. There is far too much fragment of used eraser in front of me :( As an indication to the difficulty, Byron on facebook reckons he got no more than 1...

PS if sudoku is too hard, just guess!

Found myself a computer! Good luck to everyone else participating. Here's hoping I can add further success to my nikoli win yesterday

I've had a check back to round 1 puzzle 4. I've just realised I've used a similar trick in some of my own consecutive sudoku puzzles, which is probably why I got through that puzzle without blinking! David - I think that pitching a sudoku competition at the right level is very tricky, you'll certain...

Fred - first of all congratulations on your excellent result! I think all Alan means by these comments is that he has had the pleasure of watching Byron and Hideaki perform incredulous solving feats live at previous WPC's. The main leanings of this forum so far are more general puzzles than sudoku, ...

More simply, any puzzle with (for example) these patterns with differing givens bounding out 1 or more cells
in the corner, or
on an edge

or
in the middle

can't possibly use all the squares.

He is indeed that fast - I believe there is a youtube video of him solving a classic sudoku in about 40 seconds or something even more obscene. Looking down the list also is janoslaw - Jan Mrozowski - who had them all done in a similar time but made a typo to drop points and bonus. Neither is as str...

Just finished it - will save further discussion until the contest closes - but the odd-pair bits definitely worked nicely in conjunction with the even clues