UK Puzzle Association

Do you mean the message that shows as being sent by you yesterday? I didn’t receive it, even in a spam folder.

The instructions are slightly wrong, or at least incomplete. Where they say "cells with numbers" they should say "grey-shaded cells", given that there are some that have no numbers. This might be obvious in practice but it is nonetheless important because otherwise you might naiv...

Received this in the past hour from the WPF: Dear members, The awaited online World Sudoku+Puzzle Convention starts this Friday at 3 PM GMT at the Logic Masters India website. The event lasts 11 days and besides the competition part, you can attend a lot of panels with authors and top solvers via ZO...

Registration is now working again.

Sorry for the problems registering over the past few weeks.

...it turns out the timer on the page was inaccurate and I ended up scrambling to put in my solution codes! Yes, it doesn't work properly. You need to refresh it regularly or use a separate timer. I sent Alan some replacement timer code when he first put the tournament engine online, years ago, but...

detuned wrote: ↑Thu 11 Feb, 2021 12:03 pm I love the idea for parkour - you have a wonderful eye for a variation David!

Wow - agreed! What a great idea.

I can't see why they would be hard to computer generate anyway, and the newspaper ones presumably are. Its easy to make a random solution grid and then you just need a simple brute force solver to allow you to remove given letters to the limit of uniqueness, or test for uniqueness with a fixed given...

Thanks Tom. In which case, would you personally be happy with "not even at a corner" as a replacement for "not even diagonally"? As in "Shaded areas cannot touch, not even at a corner?" I agree that more technical language such as referring to cells, edges and so on has...

“Not even diagonally” is definitely top of my hit list But what is brief, equally clear and unambiguously translatable language that completely avoids mathematical concepts such as "edge", "vertex", "orthogonally" and so forth - so is suitable for a general, internatio...

If you want people to help you'll need to explain the rules, since this clearly isn't just a regular thermometer sudoku.

I tried googling your link but it didn't bring up the video with the rules, and 'Thermo miracle' brought up a different cracking the cryptic puzzle.

@Gareth: Not necessarily. IMHO if a cell remains empty, it is not reachable at all. Or can you post a contra-example (which has only one solution)? The following puzzle has only one solution, and yet the square marked 'x' is reachable but not visited in the solution. It also has a second square not...

It's a good question. Until recently it had never occurred to me that people would solve on screen during a competition, because to me it seems self-evident that this gives a potentially big advantage for certain puzzle types. Even though on-screen solving may be a disadvantage in some cases, e.g. i...

The two main things that I will look for is cells which can only join to one given number, and numbers which only have so many possible cells that they can join. It should probably be noted that the first rule only applies if the sum of the numbers is equal to the number of empty squares, which is ...

petpar55@gmail.com wrote: ↑Mon 15 Jun, 2020 8:42 pm I can not found password to open puyyles!!!

Go to the contest page linked at the very top of the thread above, then click 'Open Page' to the right of 'Answer Submission Page'. Then click 'START NOW' to get the password. Your timer will begin at that point.

As a small assistance to help people get through these strange times, I'm adding two extra free puzzles to puzzlemix.com every day for the foreseeable future. The puzzles are a mix of mostly sudoku variants, plus kakuro, nurikabe, slitherlink, hitori, skyscraper, futoshiki, calcudoku and hanjie.

That's a good point - and it's often particularly true for unusual puzzles. Instead of reusing an existing example, the author often won't have time to make the example work really cleanly. Not that I have even looked at the examples for this competition however - so I can't say if that applies here...

I see what you mean - that extra "the" completely changed the meaning!

Just a reminder not to discuss puzzles from still-open puzzle competitions, even if just to say which you enjoyed - sorry for deleting your post, Freddie. Do post again once the competition closes.

I never get Humble Bundle email about puzzle stuff either - only games I am not interested in. Seems they don't bother emailing out about that sort of thing.

Not that this helps with your query!

The competition is still open - the deadline was extended again from Wednesday to Thursday (i.e. one day more) due to problems with the web server hosting company.

To clarify, you have not (yet) missed it. You can take part until Thursday the 27th of June, so long as you start prior to 9:25pm BST.

Due to a last-minute update, if you have already downloaded the UK Puzzle Championship competition booklet in advance of competing then please re-download it before starting the tournament.

Pretty sure he was 2nd. And congratulations indeed.

Also, https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... zle-people

This puzzle has the problem that it is not language neutral, and for that reason is not suitable for a WSC.

I'm looking to hire a full-time (or part-time) puzzle author to work at my company, Any Puzzle Media Ltd. The role is based in London, and would require you to be on-site in our office. The puzzles encompass all types, although the majority are word-based rather than WPC-style puzzles. We wrote over...

If you haven't yet booked your place, do please email Liane using the details in the message at the top of this thread. We don't expect to run out of places in the tournament room, but the hotel itself may become fully booked.