UK Puzzle Association

pinkagape wrote: ↑

Wed 31 Mar, 2021 6:42 pm

Has anyone ever met Jeremy Kong? I feel like he's regularly near the top of the UK ratings but I've never met him. Is he on the forum?

Jeremy has an account here and participates in our regular online contests, but is listed under Singapore rather than the UK.

Ah bad luck Sam, never nice to have a mistake when you think you’ve finished a round :( although looks like you’re in fairly esteemed company with Seungjae and Takuya on the clone puzzle. The most frustrating thing is that I filled the clones correctly, and then made a mistake resolving the last fe...

All fair points, but, for PuzzleDuel in particular, in the very limited number of solves I've done, I've found the interface to be so clunky that I've barely ever got to the end of a puzzle without a typographical mistake - not something that is typically a concern with paper solving or typing short...

Maybe the very harsh way in which errors are penalised by puzzle duel will discourage more speculative solving In case it changes anyone's views on how our internal competition should be run, I should say that it won't discourage me at all because I only made an account on PuzzleDuel a few days ago...

E.g. today's passage puzzle is a newer and semi-intuitive variant. I spent 5-10 seconds (which as it turns out it was a significant % of my total time) checking everything before submitting, whereas I assume Sam didn't! Perhaps a more balanced way forward would be to add 60 seconds per error, kind ...

First time not having to scroll down the page, let alone first win! I'd love to be able to produce that sort of form on demand. Everything solved very smoothly with few pauses. When I realised I was on for a good time I took some liberties with Magic Summer 3, but even so, I couldn't believe the gap...

GarethMoore wrote: ↑

Thu 04 Mar, 2021 4:39 am

The timer can drift a second or two every minute - or much worse if the browser suspends executing the Javascript at any point.

Ah, that explains it then! I had some printing errors on a few puzzles so I had the contest booklet open rather than the submission page for much of the duration.

Weirdly I found the big Yin-Yang easier than the small one. As Tom surmises, I do feel like I could've bifurcated a bit earlier to get the small one out quicker. That makes two of us! The larger one took me no more than 4 minutes. My biggest mistake this round was spending nearly 30 minutes of solv...

Thanks for a fun contest David! I had expected to finish when the contest page said I had 13 minutes remaining with only two puzzles left but it turns out the timer on the page was inaccurate and I ended up scrambling to put in my solution codes! I enjoyed the final two puzzles at a leisurely pace o...

Yes, if you notice a mistake you are able to re-submit answers as many times as you like within the contest window, and your final answers will count.

I made a linked set of 27 puzzles; they should keep you busy for quite a long time. The file is too large to attach directly to this post but you can download the PDF from this link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MHtqW_ ... sp=sharing

Note that this is version 2 of the IB; the difference from version 1 is that three puzzles worth 150+ points have been removed and the total points reduced from nearly 1300 to a "mere" 841

The second of those follow-up examples appears broken!

Yes, Classic 6 needed either advanced techniques or a well-chosen *ahem* bifurcation *ahem*. I don't 100% agree that Killer Arrows is just a gimmick - the fact that the arrow sum is forced for any given cage total doesn't necessarily make it a bad variant for me. But I don't think it was showcased p...

If I were nit-picking slightly then I might say that our creators have sometimes veered over into the computer-assisted line whilst setting these - I don’t think anyone sets anything like this entirely by hand - but all in all this is easily the most remarkable set of killer sudoku in existence tha...

If it's helpful, here's how I saw the same deduction that Freddie describes, in picture form: sending R6C6 up and right causes problems for the white pearl marked with an X.

Yeah, this was a surprisingly tricky round. There were a few low-pointer puzzles with relatively advanced deductions, most notably the first slitherlink and regional yajilin. By "first Slitherlink" do you mean the first of the S&W ones? Because I had no problem with the standard ones but that S&W k...

If anyone's looking for something to do this Saturday afternoon, here's a Sudoku contest that isn't quite your usual fare. https://logic-masters.de/Wettbewerbe/CE/wettbewerb.php?id=159 In a nutshell, 27 themed Killer Sudoku, fixed starting time, first to finish them all wins. I tested the puzzles (a...

Is there a way to get into puzzle 1 - I've not had a massive look at it yet. I solved it after time. My way into it was to subtract away cunningly-chosen disjoint clumps of areas from the entire total to leave behind only two region. Doing that in a few different ways gave me enough pairs with appr...

There's been an update to the results to reflect the issue with puzzles 4/5. James climbs a few places and Freddie slips into 3rd and will have to wait a little longer for an individual victory.

3. Freddie Hand 752
9. James McGowan 685
19. Neil Zussman 577

SM Round 1 begins imminently: https://logicmastersindia.com/live/?contest=SM202101

Results for PR Round 1 are out, the UK top three are: 7. Freddie Hand (139.98) 16. James McGowan (126.6) 34. Sam Cappleman-Lynes (111.83) I thought the puzzles were of extremely high quality, although I did somehow manage to spend 18 minutes solving Hitori (and I told Prasanna I'd never forgive him ...

Sorry to sound silly, but by parity properties you mean like a checkerboard and it has to go white black white black? The observation I used for the example was that if you colour the grid as you say, all of the tens digits of the primes share a colour, and all of the units digits share a colour. A...

Oh no, I hope you have better luck for the puzzle GP. Thanks for the tips! I was wondering, though, what is the no battenburg rule? In Cave, you have two things to keep in mind: - The white cells must be connected - The black cells must all connect to the edge of the board Imagine you had a 2x2 squ...

In the same vein as the GP thread, let's combine these two threads this year. The first Puzzle Ramayan round has started, and runs throughout the weekend.

https://logicmastersindia.com/live/?contest=PR202101