UK Puzzle Association

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...

Hi Erin - I hope the lockdown is treating you reasonably well. The forum isn't amazingly active but I'd definitely recommend keeping an eye on the online competitions that are happening, generally over the weekends

Yeah Alex likes to have an easy, medium and hard level puzzle as something his readers can build up through. THe two puzzles I put together were the first and second examples I'd put together. I was quite pleased with how they came out!

I thought this might be of interest to everyone :) https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/06/can-you-solve-it-double-chocolate?fbclid=IwAR3iIJQjjZ4T-wOakwRefPnziC_38fSIM_By_hNZQsN8MVl0u5tOKpJm9IE If anyone would like to have a go at the puzzles from the UK Open, then please see this link: http...

I did not enjoy that round for many reasons - and looking at those results I don't think I was the only one!

54. Sam Cappleman-Lynes 450
71. Jeremy Kong 404
77. Tom Collyer 394

I wouldn't be totally convinced that's not just a coincidence Sam - at any rate this tic tac toe puzzle seems a bit friendlier and less reliant on second order logic than yours, although some of the same hidden gimmicks still apply (e.g. orientations of even winning lines). I wonder what this Kropki...

Interesting... those puzzles are live here: instruction https://drive.google.com/file/d/11OayiF-gq4umM4FUVwPNaK---7oreyTS/view?usp=sharing SetA https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EHuDeDVkFEyhEe62YvwDBl4EnJIDDbOF/view?usp=sharing SetB https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwYQq7QQyUrjWeNz4GEmrvBUgsShXZUB/vi...