Hello from Glasgow!

[Lumen]

Hello everyone! My name's Lewis, and I'm a student from Glasgow. I'm just finishing off a degree in maths and computing science, and come September (all going well!), I'll be starting a PhD in CS at Glasgow.

I've been enjoying puzzles for quite a while now (I think the first computer game I ever played was this sliding block puzzle that my cousin couldn't figure out...), particularly puzzle games, but over time I've found that the most satisfying puzzles to solve have been culture independent, and that's led me very naturally to paper puzzles.

So far I've got a hold of a few Nikoli books which I've been working through, along with Puzzle Ninja and a few copies of Beyond Sudoku, but Toketa's been the absolute highlight so far - if only it wasn't so hard to get physical copies sorted I'm definitely interested in having a go at some competitive puzzling too, though I'm not quite sure how to get started.

[detuned]

Hi Lewis, welcome to the forums! Speaking from experience I can certainly say it’s a brave individual who takes on a PhD - good luck!

I’m impressed you’ve managed to find beyond sudoku - Gareth will be pleased to hear that I’m sure. Doubly impressed you’ve managed to find Toketa - I’ve only ever since physical copies distributed by the Japanese team on site at world championships.

If you enjoy all of that and have a competitive streak I’m sure you’ll enjoy the various online competitions that are occurring - please do join in the inevitable post-competition debrief about you enjoyed and what you struggled with of contests are the sort of thing to float your boat.

The puzzle and sudoku GP is a good place to start - you need a spare 90 minutes, a printer, an internet connection and a pencil/eraser to get started. If you need further help navigating please do give us a shout. I’m sure Adam would be happy to give you a primer on the UK puzzle divisions that he runs as well.

https://gp.worldpuzzle.org/

[Lumen]

Hi Lewis, welcome to the forums! Speaking from experience I can certainly say it’s a brave individual who takes on a PhD - good luck!

Much appreciated! (I also definitely didn't find the forums to procrastinate from finishing my dissertation..)

Speaking of online competitions, I think I _just_ managed to get a submission in for GP3 - it was definitely a bit of a mad rush, especially dealing with login issues, but after normally being pretty leisurely with puzzles it was an interesting change of pace. At least for the next one I'll have a little more time to prepare

[jupilogy]

Hi Lumen! Wow, you've taken the exact same academic path (maths&cs->cs) as me so far. Good luck with it. Although I'm a bit further south than Glasgow

Hope to see you around!

[pinkagape]

Hi

Always good to see newcomers to competitive puzzling.

The UK puzzle league is designed to set puzzlers up with competitors at the same level as them, and to provide an introduction to different puzzle types.

The beginners division has finished at the moment until September, but you can still download the rounds from this year in the Division D thread on the competitions board.

If you look on the main website I’ve started to put together old rounds from previous years which I’ll try to update over the next couple of months.

There’s also an advanced round of Nanro and Yajilin which I’ll be publishing an instruction booklet for in the next day or so, so you may wish to keep an eye out for that.