UK Puzzle Association

Forgot to mention it here (I only took part at 2115 last night) but we had round 4 of the sudoku GP this weekend. Looks like another healthy participation this time round! Sam submitted all puzzles but again has a mistake so his final rank and score are TBC. They will in any case still be the best U...

Did you see Mark and Simon did a cracking the cryptic video on the whole thing? Plenty of spoilers, but fair play to them, it was thoroughly comprehensive. I looked at it briefly on the day it came out, but that was in and out of work, and I never got around to finishing it off. I did enjoy seeing h...

I stumbled upon his blog a while ago - occasionally he talks about puzzles on it: https://www.jkong.co.uk/blog/

I don't recall meeting him at any point...

Preliminary results for the round are out - Freddie is top of the pile for now, but I note that's with 20/19 sent/ok so hopefully that's only a minor error that lets him keep the bonus. I'll hold off on a top 3 for now. I was feeling quite pleased about getting through the encoded slitherlink with a...

Puzzle GP round 3 instructions are out. 687 total points spread over 20 puzzles, with no puzzle worth more than 66 points. It could end up being a bit of a sprint for some solvers. Here’s a handy reminder to make sure you’re careful checking your puzzles and also your puzzle answer keys!

One of the interesting things about the puzzle duel site is that it gives a fairly detailed personal rating history. I mention that as last week was objectively the worst I had for 3 months, and so also don’t want to be seen as grumbling about the past :) I started blogging about this earlier in the...

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. Also interesting news re a couple of Poles done in for cheating. Presumably they were collaborating, otherwise I...

Well done everyone

I’m always pleased to see some masyu! Maybe my times are enough to give Freddie something to think about

Looks as if the bonus has been indiscriminately applied to all the claim bonus people with 15 submitted in thise preliminary results - I wouldn't be surprised to see me jump up a few places if some of those bonuses get wiped out! I have to say I enjoy it much more when the round feels like it has a ...

In case anyone hasn’t seen, it’s sudoku GP weekend. A little bit late now but you can still take part up until 9.30 GMT tonight (the competition window shuts at 11pm)

Further thoughts: plenty of competitive online interfaces do not penalise errors at all (nikoli.com and fed-sudoku come to mind). Instead, they don't let you submit any kind of answer to be recorded until you happen to get the correct one. That definitely gives you a strong advantage if you happened...

Maybe the very harsh way in which errors are penalised by puzzle duel will discourage more speculative solving - but theoretically making a mistake and having that pointed out is helpful to solving the puzzle. It also makes it fairer to those solvers who intentionally choose to spend a bit of time c...

I really enjoyed this contest, thank you David! The puzzles by themselves were great, but I also want to call out the overall selection and balance of puzzles to make up the whole contest - as Hausigel says it was beautiful!

Looking forward to the Masyu contest already!

I think you may have got lucky with the SPOLICY’s. My intuition ended up failing me so I had to go for a full casebash, which wasn’t particularly enjoyable. EKBM took 4 minutes on each of them though so I don’t feel quite as bad about it. Haha, maybe I’m just seeing something that all you speed dem...

Hmm interesting... I didn't really have any problems with the SPOLICY (SLICY OP?). Admittedly it was more intuition and tweak, but I gave one of them a go in the last couple of minutes and only narrowly missed out getting the key in before time. I solved the other in much the same way in a couple of...

Seems no-one here remembered to post that it was a puzzle GP round this weekend. A nice mix of puzzles I thought, even if the Valentine's theme was a couple of weeks too late. Still, it was not a bad UK showing: 32 + James by my count. Aside of the usual suspects at the top of the leaderboard, reall...

I look forward to working through these when I get a chance. I wonder how hard it'd be to set up a web tool to produce some customisable puzzle graphics (size, fonts, shades of grey, gridlines, decorations, etc) output though - SVG files aren't exactly rocket science

I'd be happy to help - I'd be a little bit disappointed if it took as long as 45 minutes though!

Oh and if I’m not wrong classic 6 required a y-wing... if so it seems the policy to not have harder techniques unless very well signposted has gone out the window.

I enjoyed the renban and cloned shapes - not exactly smooth solving, but definitely satisfying!

Oh that’s frustrating, I forgot to answer Rossini, and did something silly with Renban. Bye bye 130 odd points :/ FB51CCE6-E5A3-4666-A773-478B3F0D6175.png Killer-arrows is a poorly designed variant that requires you to figure out the “trick”. All the cages are forced instantly: for a >= 4 cell cage ...

If that's the case then I'll take by back my nit-picking and doff my hat. That is extraordinary! It's not to say setting using computer assistance is somehow a bad thing by the way - if we took that out of the equation we'd lose many, many fine puzzles. If that 27 puzzle was set by hand I will also ...

As this contest is very much in the “just for fun” category with an open-ended finish date, I don’t think I’m doing too much harm by sharing a few thoughts now. I battled my way through this this yesterday. A cursory glance at the results table tells you a couple of things: https://logic-masters.de/...

I love the idea for parkour - you have a wonderful eye for a variation David!

Adam - it may well be worth checking to see if David is test solving the GP. I won't be taking part in the PR. Adam - re the Puzzle Duel contest, I have been playing along anonymously on the website for quite a while now, and I'm not sure I'm ready to out myself just yet (not that I'm doing that wel...

Hi - please do make yourself at home, get involved in the discussions and feel free to ask any questions!