UK Puzzle Association

It always makes me very sad to see OEBS presented without the kanji characters - I don't know why

It's fair to say the solving path for these puzzles can end up being quite linear. I did enjoy playing with the partition trick in rows 3 and 4 though!

Well done James and David! And many thanks to Liane and the authors for the organisation I'm pretty disappointed in the answer keys. I don't believe the 1 character typo in my Masyu key was really worth the -60 points I was awarded. The fact that so few people ended up without any kind of answer key...

Further to Liane's post above, to be absolutely clear the contest has (currently) been extended to Wednesday evening:

Wed 26 Jun 2019 23:55 BST (GMT+1)

Liane - re answer codes, the instructions provide fairly clear detail about what the answer keys should be - e.g. for cave: Answer Key: Going clockwise from the top left corner enter the area of the groups of cells that are connected to the outside of the grid that are not part of the cave, separate...

Thanks Sam! I hope everyone enjoyed it. 2017 seems like a very long time ago now, but yes that was also a remarkable year!

Simon has also done a video for the Killer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlOc6Y-MHIk

Simon (who sadly didn't take part) has also put up a video explaining how to solve the Sandwich Sudoku

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHeVtCTUhGI

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. In general the level of competition was very high, which is particularly pleasing from a personal perspective - not least because a couple of people...

Congratulations to David McNeill, who has claimed a 4th UK Sudoku Championship. David finished all 17 of the puzzles in an impressive time of 1 hour and 45 minutes. Last year's champion, Sam Cappleman-Lynes was narrowly beaten into second place, also finishing the set in 1 hour and 48 minutes. Sam i...

After the absolute shambles with the answer keys, the preliminary results are now available. I cannot understand how these are not being checked and verified properly BEFORE the round starts, let alone after it finishes. All's well that ends well I suppose. Top 3 UK: 17. James McGowan 549 33. Saul G...

Round 6 Results: 14 Neil Zussman 108.5 26 Tom Collyer 100 29 James McGowan 93.2 That brings the series to a close. Again the scores were (somewhat dubiously) normalised to the top scorer (Ken Endo, for each of the 6 rounds), and the best 4 from 6 were counted to give a final score out of 400 here: h...

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? Yeah I'll fix that. To be absolutely clear, Puzzle #1 is a single 6x6 grid with Odd Sudoku rules, a...

Instructions with points distributions are now available:

http://ukpuzzles.org/file_download.php? ... 5b7a35c1a7

Rishi Puri has been spending a bit of time developing a new sudoku website - the aim is to have daily classic and variants.

https://sudokumaniacs.com

Please see this thread to specifically ask questions regarding the UKSC (Sudoku):

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2005

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 e...

For completeness, top 3 from round 6: 39 Tom Collyer 84.5 58 Sam Cappleman-Lynes 73 68 Matthew White 67 A final leaderboard is available here . Scores have been normalised using a rather basic linear scaling (not optimal with such a highly varying series of rounds) - so that the top score =100. The ...

For round 6, I did not get the hidden palindrome logic at all... perhaps I’m missing something obvious??

I’ll post the uk results up later

It’s usually a couple of weeks afterwards (as a rule of thumb we aim for 2nd and 4th weekends in June), but I’ll leave Liane to confirm

Preliminary UK results (not that these tend to change all that much)

37 James McGowan 444
45 Sam Cappleman-Lynes 424
52 Neil Zussman 398

Quite a strange looking set of results - I haven't yet solved the test but I imagine a fair amount of it came down to puzzle selection

Round 5 Results:

9 James McGowan 106.5
13 Neil Zussman 102.1
50 Saul Glasman 70.7

Simon's been doing some cracking the cryptic video's that might be helpful - this one covers last year's Thermo Sudoku

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRSFXCpBBek

Hi everyone, It's not much of an announcement to say that this process has been on hold for the last couple of months. I've been having a hard time of it with my job and I'm generally feeling depressed and drained of energy when I do get some time to myself. Whilst in theory this is supposed to be a...

Tough round I thought, and I didn't think I'd done particularly well:

42. Tom Collyer 457
51. Jeremy Kong 429
73. Mark Goodliffe 390

Round 5 happening this weekend!

This is the discussion thread for the 2019 UK Sudoku Championship. It will also act as the second qualifier for the UK A team competing at the World Sudoku Championships in Kirchheim, Germany to be held on the 29th September - 6th October 2019 (note that these dates also include time for the World P...