4 Seasons Cup Summer Test - The beach

[Ours brun]

Hello UKpuzzlers,

I am here to announce the coming of the third round of the 4 Seasons Cup, hosted by ffsudoku.com. The test will be organized by Geoffroy Hermelin, aka wikmouic, and will be made of 12 sudoku variants to solve within 120 minutes.

The theme of the test is "relations between neighbours"; in particular, you can expect many puzzles to play with consecutive/nonconsecutive constraints.

It will be open from friday 16 to sunday 18 september. Like for previous contests, the IB and PB will be available in english versions. The IB is already downloadable here.

The puzzle booklet (password protected) is now available.

Feel free to ask all questions here or on the forum ffsudoku.

Finally, to access the contest, just click on the image below.

[Ours brun]

Change : the contest will start on 16 and not 17, to accomodate more players. The puzzle booklet will be uploaded soon.

[david mcneill]

At what time on 16 September does the competition start?

[Ours brun]

I never know how to express clearly midnight in english, and it led to some misunderstanding last time. Considering what I have learned, I am tempted to say "Thursday 12:00 AM" but I wouldn't bet on it. I guess "midnight between thursday and friday" is ok...

[PuzzleScot]

00:00 Friday is probably clearer (UTC or French local/summertime?)

[Ours brun]

Perfect. So, 00:00 Friday, French summertime (UTC +2). Just to be sure : it means little more than 2 hours to wait.

[Ours brun]

The tournament has started. From now, you have exactly 72 hours to start. Good luck to all contestants !

[Ours brun]

A mistake has been spotted on puzzle 8 - Kropki sudoku. A black dot is missing between R5C3 and R5C4. An actualised version of the file has been uploaded; please download the puzzle booklet again if you had already downloaded it.

[david mcneill]

Bastien,

I couldn't solve the Kropki puzzle during the test (despite making two or three attempts), but I didn't have time immediately afterwards to check what the problem was. Sorry for not flagging this problem sooner.

[Ours brun]

If I know anything for sure, David, it is that you do not have to apologize for this ! The only one to blame here is me, who drawed the puzzles too fast (the original puzzle by Geoffroy was alright). So, sorry about this and I hope you had fun on the test anyway.

By the way, the results are available. As you can see, it has been decided to include the kropki in the results for several reasons, in particular the fact that many players solved it without noticing everything. The solution is probably not ideal, but in this case not counting the puzzle at all would have been worse, I think.

Last round of the cup will be the autumn one. Be assured that I will be extra careful so that to not repeat this kind of mistake...