UK Puzzle Association

Congratulations to David McNeill, who has claimed a consecutive UK Sudoku Championship, bringing his tally to 5 overall. David finished all 16 of the puzzles in an impressive time of 1 hour and 48 minutes. In what was a harder set of puzzles for this year's competition, Freddie Hand and Adam Bissett...

Credit for the puzzles also goes to Sam Cappleman Lynes - having a wider range of puzzles to consider for the set maybe made things more difficult, but on reflection it’s a nice problem to have!

Good to see you here - hope you get a chance to enjoy the UKSC

I received the following question by email: hi Tom, hope you are well. for tomorrow's Sudoku championship there are variants - one of them is Linked Sudoku. my question is: since we have to provide answers as 2 strings A (horizontal) and B(vertical) should the horizontal string (A) include both halv...

I hope it's a good sign that there are no questions so far!

The points distribution has now been added to the instructions. These can be found here:

https://ukpuzzles.org/file_download.php ... c762c9530e

The instructions are now live here: [link to previous version of instructions removed, please see below] Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to finalise the points distribution, as I work to incorporate all the testing feedback. An updated version of the instructions will be available by Wednesd...

This is the discussion thread for the 2020 UK Sudoku Championship. The 2020 World Sudoku Championships originally planned to take place in Shanghai, China have been postponed until 2021. As such it is uncertain what bearing this contest will have on UK team selection. It is likely to have at least s...

Maybe things are getting to me, but it’s beginning to get more than a little wearing to seemingly get into arguments like this every time I have the temerity to suggest how things might be improved. It’s almost as if people think I’m coming from a position of sour grapes or bad faith towards whoever...

You what?!? Exactly how badly have I made things out to be - I’m somewhat bemused by some of the reactions here. I’m not sure how I’ve managed to start a (somewhat petty) argument... I’ve said that I didn’t understand the rules during time, I’ve said that’s largely due to lack of preparation on my s...

Another suggestion I've seen elsewhere is: rather than have huge long paragraphs where you have many sentences strung together, a clearer format is something like: Describe the solving mechanic [E.g. draw a loop/shade some cells/place some a number in ever cell etc] first. Then every constraint is l...

The sentence started "if two cells touch...", the subsequent reference to the "...same (numbered) cell" was split over two lines (and also by parentheses), and in general these puzzles tend to have adjacency conditions. I freely admit I wasn't prepared, all I'm saying is I think I might have had a b...

You could do length of line segments for yajilin like for other loop puzzles. One of these days I’m going to try putting together a database of what keys works best for what puzzles. Perhaps those puzzles were susceptible to a few final sting in the tail moments. I got caught out on the scrabble lik...

I think bad choice of answer keys also comes into play, but it does seem quite low even so! You could have easily have chosen columns from the tapa borders rather than rows. The key to the second galaxies was even more painful.

Just a heads up on this - there are now 6 links on the download link posted above. The first 3 are specific to the puzzle competition. If you are after the sudoku competition, then you want the last set of 3 links (in order: solutions, competition, instructions)

This happened yesterday I think, although my Japanese isn't so hot. Anyhow, the files are available to download from this link: https://jppuzzles.com/jpcjnpc/wscwpc-senbatsu2020/download/ Note that this is the same link as for the sudoku round. Only the first three links are relevant to the puzzle c...

Round 5 is happening this weekend

Looks like some results are in: https://logic-masters.de/Wettbewerbe/CE ... php?id=147

Congrats to Freddie for being the first person to finish who isn't called Ken Endo A really great result that!

Hi everyone. I thought it would be worth letting people know that I've completed the What Is a Sudoku report, and handed it over to the WPF board to do whatever they want with it. The original report can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gl2D2FBy8sbJPnIugUmcNgER6Sp2UhOIxQCLvUXxMj8/e...

That is what I did - maybe I did get it after all then! I was also looking at something for some clone interactions that might have involved the four cells at R5 C1,9 and R1,9 C5 for example.

Thanks for the puzzles Sam! Just started working through them: the second has a very neat break-in. Since school is closed for the foreseeable future, I may start producing some puzzles again... I think I might have missed this neat break-in. After a lot of staring at it, I did a short bit of trial...

This also happened at some point yesterday. It's a single round of 120 minutes. It's a bit harder to decipher the Japanese website, but I believe this is where you need to look: https://jppuzzles.com/jpcjnpc/wscwpc-senbatsu2020/download/ The first file to download is the solutions, the second is the...

This happened yesterday - the 5 rounds are freely available to download. I don't think I'll do them all in one go but the round timings are there to see how you might have compared. As far as I can see from the UK contingent, only Freddie played along live. You will need to register with the logic m...

The killer from the second popped up on cracking the cryptic, and it did seem kind of familiar. If you enjoyed that one from Sam I suspect you'll also like the killer on the 2019 UKSC

Re this round and Freddie's apparent comfort, I would point out that 13 puzzles is relatively few in the grand scheme of things (more like 15 or 16 is usual) - it could mean that some of the puzzles are a bit fiddly as Sam says. This might be the casef more attention has been given to how the puzzle...

So am I justified in feeling slightly annoyed that the puzzle in the contest was different from past Hashtag Sudokus, and in particular, different from the one in the example booklet? There's not exactly a huge body of past puzzles to compare it to, but I still would have liked for a different name...