UK Puzzle Association

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...

For me, both a higher points total and a higher place in Puzzle GP 5 than in Sudoku GP 5. Alan did promise that joining the UKPA would turn me into a "proper" puzzler

Preliminary results should be ignored for the time being, as the points values showing as being awarded for each puzzle are still the points values from GP 3.

If you didn't do the Compass during the contest, I highly recommend it to be solved at your leisure. Beautiful puzzle.

I enjoyed the final remainder puzzle after time. During the contest I started with it, and thought I'd shown it had no solutions after 5 minutes, so moved onto the other puzzles, taking a few minutes between each one to see if I could spot my mistake with the remainders. Only realised after the cont...

Round 3 this weekend: http://logicmastersindia.com/SM/201902/

I knew Classic 5 was familiar to me! For those who have access, take a look at the final Classic from WSC 2017 Rd 5. Almost identical clue-layout, and the break-in step is the same as in that puzzle too, although less obvious here and not telegraphed as clearly. In that puzzle, the crucial digits al...

Top 3 UK Round 2 according to the preliminary results are: 45. Sam Cappleman-Lynes 491 96. Mark Goodliffe 382 101. Heather Golding 371 Only 12 all-correct finishers this time, compared to 28 for Round 1, so a step up in difficulty! And 19 solvers (including myself) who were able to solve everything ...

I had a bit of a nightmare for this one. Despite getting the tricky start on Unordered Pairs I somehow missed the existence of one of the other clues and had to make a guess after being stuck for a long time. Coded Pairs felt arduous and I managed to break the Fortress twice before eventually solvin...

I think, even if this puzzle could be presented in a way that made the regions clear, I would argue against its inclusion on the grounds that it is entirely equivalent to classic sudoku and this presentation of classic sudoku amounts to nothing more than a gimmick.

This variant (with these exact regions) is pointless, because it's completely equivalent to classic sudoku. Take the yellow cells as the top-left 3x3 box of a classic, the red cells as the top-middle, the green cells as the top-right, the pink cells as the middle-left etc. Then all cells which were ...

(Throughout this post, "standard solving techniques" refers to singles, line-box interactions (pointing/claiming) pairs, triples, quads, X-Wings, swordfish and jellyfish) In my oppinion, someone who claims to be a sudoku champion should be able to solve all 9x9 standard sudokus, even with quite diff...

Aside from my frustration (at myself!) for being extremely slow to spot the Deja Vu rules (I spent approximately 30 of the 90 minutes not actually solving sudoku...), thank you David for some lovely puzzles and a fun contest! I'm especially impressed by how the Deja Vu concept didn't detract at all ...