UK Puzzle Association

In this (rare?) case account confirmation by the admin would not work either, because there are real people doing the registration. A better way could be that the very first message of a new subscriber needs approval by the admin (phpBB supports that). The problem is that the UKPA mailing list is e...

There should be no lenience on answer keys - it's incredibly unfair once you start giving any credit for wrong keys, as I think anyone who has ever run a tournament would agree. Why should someone who took the time to check be penalised in favour of someone who didn't bother?

I didn't look at the C puzzles, but didn't really spot a massive step up in difficulty between A and B. Apart from being supposed to be easier, the B puzzles are also all meant to be standard types rather than variants. The idea is that you aren't penalized so much for not having a lot of experienc...

You have a separate time limit for each division you choose to do, as Alan says. The reason for the new structure is to make it much easier for new puzzlers to get involved. At the moment most online competitions are set to challenge the very best solvers, with relatively few easy puzzles. Hopefully...

The rules state: Class B participants are those who qualify for at least one of the following conditions and do not qualify for any of the conditions for Class A: Finished in the top 100 ranking for the 2015 Puzzle GP Finished in the top 250 ranking for the 2016 Puzzle GP Competitive Section Compete...

Interesting analysis. Putting the UKPC itself aside for a moment, I think the overall difficulty of puzzle competitions has tended to go up with time due to the narrow set of people who keep playing requiring ever tougher puzzles. I think the puzzles tend to be more variants of variants, or crossove...

Interestingly, I see that Puzzler use the term 'fitword' when they place the puzzles on a crossword grid, and 'kriss-kross' when they are free-form:
http://www.puzzler.com/puzzles-a-z/fitword

Not sure anyone else makes that distinction, though!

Fit Word is common too. And kriss-kross is usually spelled Criss-cross if you're not Puzzler.

If you haven't tried the LMI Loop Pool 'fun' contest this weekend, it is actually good fun. There's no time limit, so you can take as long as you like. It uses six of the loop variants from their previous puzzle contest to form one big loop puzzle. http://logicmastersindia.com/2016/03F2/ It's open u...

The official website for this year's WPC and WSC is now available: http://slovakia2016.org/

Questions about the WPC/WSC should be posted on the WPF forum: http://forum.worldpuzzle.org/viewforum.php?f=17

Wish I'd read that 5 minutes ago!

Turns out the LMI site does not allow you to start competitions with less than the full time available, so it won't let me start with a time 5 minutes under that otherwise allotted. That's probably a good thing in general, mind.

Just to add to what Alan and Prasanna said above, if you post on the LMI contest-specific forum then your post will show up immediately for people who have already entered the competition, but won't show up for anyone else until the competition is over. But apart from on that special LMI forum, sinc...

Apart from a few people who have standing orders, most people last paid the summer before last after Mike made the year from July 2014 to July 2015 free since we were hosting the WSC/WPC. I need to send people requests for payment for the current year starting from this summer through until next sum...

I'm not holding out too much hope for the Times coverage: the reporter rang up this morning wanting extra details to develop an "angle" for the story. I struggled to contain my laughter when he asked whether there was anything interesting about me! http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/puzzles/article45558...

You should have received an email about the contest on 21st of June, and a reminder on the 4th of July. If not, check your spam folder!

You should have had an email reminder - all signed up users had a reminder.

This question was asked at the event, and it was said that they would not be released afterwards. If you want to do the competition rounds, you have to come to the on-site event.

Yes, the book arrived mid-week as Liane says so I put one on every seat for the final WPC gala dinner. This is the one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mammoth-Book-New-Sudoku-Skyscraper/dp/1472100220/ It's one of my favourite books - 495 puzzles with nearly 150 different Sudoku variants (25 major variants).

Accommodation will be at the hotel, and there is also accommodation being arranged for the Friday night for those who want it too. I certainly plan to get there on the Friday evening to avoid early morning travel on Saturday!

detuned wrote:Times article (subscription only): http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/puzzles/s ... 192619.ece

I presume the puzzles were actually 9x9, not 8x8 as claimed in the article? ("If just one of the 64 squares is blank, or filled with an incorrect number, they’ve failed.")

detuned wrote:I've genuinely learned something here - I never knew medicament was a word!

Wow, me neither! Although to make sense in the context of pills, it really should say medicine instead by the look of it.

In "Build a maze", round 2, is marking in the solution path to the maze sufficient? This isn't shown in the example, but if you draw the solution path but don't mark all walls is that still valid? Obviously only so long as the actual solution is correctly and unambiguously shown?

Just to clarify, it's not a jigsaw product killer - it's a regular killer sudoku but with product operations, as in the instructions booklet. The arithmetic is pretty easy - you can trivially see if a number is divisible by 2 or 5 for example, whereas with adding you need to mess about and see wheth...

I am minded to ask the organisers if non-maths-graduates are allowed to bring a calculator to help with the Product Killer multiplications? I'm rubbish at mental arithmetic, but product-based puzzles are often easier than summation ones, in my experience. If you try some product puzzles you'll see ...

The file is large because it contains giant (but fuzzy) full-colour bitmaps. You can fix this by changing the PDF image compression options, so I've fixed this in the attached version, which is much smaller, and I've also corrected the Trio Sudoku example which was in fact for a Little Killer Trio S...