UK Puzzle Association

Tom, this is fantastic work - thank you. The pragmatic approach you propose makes a lot of sense to me, and I hope the WPF will take a similar view of it. On an initial reading, some points jumped out to me as perhaps needing an edit or some extra clarification. 1) "Cells must have a finite number o...

Seeing a finned swordfish in a competitive scenario is highly impressive. Some would say "pointless", or "a waste of time". I know that a lot of solvers don't think that such logic has a place in speedsolving. But I've made the argument before that there are specific types of (finned) fish that are...

Here you go James: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1697

I agree with you that the symmetric products sums is an awful variant, but its inclusion in this round was great for me. I must have looked in the right places very quickly because even though it was a 70+ pointer, I got it done in under 5 minutes. I also found a sneaky deduction on the Odd-Even whi...

Preliminary results for Round 8: 13. Sam Cappleman-Lynes 721.7 44. Tom Collyer 525 60. Jeremy Kong 435 Leaving the top 3 UK in the final standings as: 29. Sam Cappleman-Lynes 3193.7 50. Tom Collyer 2805 66. Jeremy Kong 2504 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------...

Thanks Freddie and James, In a sense, I suppose that means the dismaying answer (on the whole) is that I'm not missing any amazing tricks - the techniques are roughly the ones I'm already using, I'm just not very good at them. Except that 5x5 trick which is nice to have in the back pocket! James, th...

Feadoor wrote: ↑

Thu 11 Jul, 2019 6:34 am

I'd need to attain a new high score of 528 on Round 8 to break 3000 points.

So that means I can leave the awkward-looking symmetric product sum puzzle alone and "just" do everything else.

Shame there's also a medium nonconsecutive or I'd give this plan a go!

Full text of my email is as follows; Good afternoon, I am writing with regard to The Times Sudoku Championship, which you have attended in previous years. Following a review of this event, I regret to say that we have decided to discontinue the Sudoku Championship and, consequently, the event will n...

This section of the forum isn't too active, but hopefully I'll get some replies! So, some questions about Arrows puzzles: 1. How do you solve them? 2. How do you solve them quickly? 3. Any useful notation? I've attached an image of my solved copies of the two Arrows from this year's GP. The first I ...

I've just received an email saying that the Times Sudoku Championship has been discontinued, and as such will not run this year.

Shame.

A second-worst round of 449 means I'd need to attain a new high score of 528 on Round 8 to break 3000 points. It's possible - I've had 3 scores of over 500 points already.

Or alternatively spot that the 2s in box 4 eliminate it from the rest of C5 which gets you through the rest of the puzzle without ever needing to spot the trick in rows 3 and 4.

I guess I had about of a blind spot with this puzzle!

Thanks! I'd even already made the equivalent deduction with the odd/even clues in R34...

After the contest, I've had a go at re-solving all of the puzzles in order to better appreciate them without time pressure, and have a go at finding a logical solving path to those that I guessed on. So does anyone know how to solve the Odd-Even-Big-Small logically? I'm at this point, and guessing w...

The preliminary results are supposedly out, but I would take them with a pinch of salt, because the points attributed to each puzzle, in most cases, do not match the points values from the instruction booklet...

Round 7 will happen this weekend and the Czech and Slovak authors appear to have prepared a themed round - only 7 distinct puzzle types, but each one appears three times in standard, isometric and hexagonal variants.

https://gp.worldpuzzle.org/content/inst ... -booklet-2

Round 7 happened at the weekend. Top 3 UK:

42. Sam Cappleman-Lynes 449
72. Tom Collyer 367
94. Matthew White 335

I thought that was a hard round, especially the Sum by X and Renban puzzles.

And one tip for anyone who thinks they'll struggle to calculate the area of an angled rectangle for the Shakashaka answer key, there's no need to count up triangles! Count the number of diagonal units along each of a pair of sides, calculate the area as if they were the actual side lengths, then dou...

Thanks Liane! I'll kick off the questions... - There are conflicting lengths of time for the contest. Most places say 2.5 hours, but the "Points and Bonuses" section of the instructions says "the allotted two hours" and the contest page itself says "3 hours". - In Pentopia the instructions suggest t...

And on behalf of everyone I'm sure, huge thanks to you Tom for putting together another Championship of very high quality!

detuned wrote: ↑

Wed 12 Jun, 2019 6:18 pm

This is the first year by my reckoning where we've had two UK finishers - it doesn't happen all that often and it's a great achievement to pull it off.

2017 would like a word... https://ukpuzzles.org/final-results.php ... &country=1

Congratulations David on a triumphant return to the UKSC!

The instructions for Odd/Even Sudoku begin with the phrase "in each grid..." - does this mean there will be multiple grids, or is this a remnant from instructions originally written for a Linked 6x6?

Top 3 UK:

38. Sam Cappleman-Lynes 501
55. Tom Collyer 426
58. Jeremy Kong 416

The main thing is to narrow down the cells that can/cannot be the removed cell along a palindrome line. Work out which cells are the possible "mirror" cells along a line based on which cell is removed, and narrow down the possibilities based on which pairs can't contain equal values. That becomes ea...