Thanks for the tournament !

Some nice and hard puzzles here !

In my opinion it was a tournament that goes beyond sudoku. And perhaps LMI is the best place to organize such a tournament.
There was no real surprise for me, as the title of the tournament, the types of variants and rules suggested what they will be (no extra symbols - T's, arrows, or circles; missing cages or outlines of regions).
In my opinion, only 6 sudokus were suitable for a sudoku competition, every "surprise" puzzle and both masyu requiring more than sudoku-solving ability to be solved.

In puzzles with missing T's and arrows you had to orient these symbols in interaction with placements of digits in cells. In the black and white killer, the question was not the extra-symbol, but the missing cages (that puzzle was frustrating because you could solve 90% of the sudoku part before to need to find the cages - the same for the second secret code sudoku: the sudoku part was quite easy, before having only a few cells unfilled and need to find this secret code - I did mistakes on both puzzles, because I had not the patience to finish to solve the puzzle after having solved 90% of the sudoku part of the puzzle).
In the second disparity sudoku, I found the solution before having found the regions (found only one region). Of course I have found a few "must be connected" cells to solve it.
And finally the masyu was clearly an hybrid of sudoku with another kind of puzzle and drawing a loop is not what you expect about a sudoku.

To be clear: I'm not complaining myself about anything and I don't want to be a "sudoku fundamentalist", but for me it was not really a sudoku tournament. I would not be happy to see such variations in a WSC for example.
On the other hand, if it were a real "puzzle tournament", I would not have been able to beat Prasanna, for example, so this tournament was perhaps midway between a sudoku tournament and a puzzle tournament.

Anyway, thanks for creating these nice puzzles and organizing this tournament

Fred

Don't take me as an example, Fred. I had a generally horrible time of this one.

The last thing you want to be doing is spending the first 12 minutes wondering why a 9 isn't fitting in the Tee Total Sudoku.
And then there was the line I drew by mistake which gave me a wrong border and messed up the entire bottom Black and White Killer.
To top it all, at the end, in my mind I had the right answer to the bottom Secret Code, but ended up swapping 2 and 3.

The puzzles were really fun though and the theme was really well executed. Thanks, David

Thanks David, I knew that was going to be hard. I'd gone wrong one one and abandoned another, but fortunately managed to get the answer to my last on in just in time even though I'd had to get up and let the cat out.

Was there sufficient variety in the puzzle types represented?	Yes, lot of variety
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Did you like the surprise element in the second puzzle of each type?	Definitely yes
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

Terrific work David! I especially admire the theme of the first one...since it came from you :D. This was really masterful, teach me sometime!

HI HOW TO TAKE THE TEST? WHERE ARE THE QUESTIONS / SUDOKOS? THE BOOKLET ALSO ASKING FOR SOME PASSWORD. WITHOUT THE PROBLEM..HOW TO SOLVE IT?

In the same page you will have a button Start Sudoku Surprise. If you click the button, you will get the password. Please use the password to open the booklet, which will have the sudokus to solve. You can take a print and solve it and submit the answers within the time specified i.e. 150 minutes.

A very interesting tournament..many puzzles were new to me. Enjoyed them.

David, Well constructed puzzles and clever theme. I now have several challenging puzzles to work on over the holiday weekend. Thanks for putting the contest together!Cheers,Dave

The score page is final now. Password removed from sudoku booklet.

Thanks David for an interesting set of sudokus. Some of them were little on the tougher side, but it was probably expected given that only 14 sudokus were to be solved in 150 minutes. I personally like the concept of Disparity Sudoku the most.

Regarding puzzle-y nature of the some of the Sudokus - I agree with Fred that not all of these are "strict" sudokus. But we have been conducting the Mahabharat series which has all the classic-y stuff. When David proposed this set, I thought it will be nice deviation from that.

Kota's timing is really impressive, almost unbelievable, considering that he is 14 minutes faster than the next best EKBM, who in turn is 12 minutes faster than TiiT and misko.

The monster is now asleep. My sincere thanks to Deb for hosting the contest and guiding me through the process. I am indebted to Tom Collyer, Yuhei Kusui and Robert Vollmert for being prepared to bravely go into the test-solving unknown and for their valuable feedback. Thank you to the LMI solving community for giving this a go, despite the length of time which had to be set aside and the hybrid nature of some of the Sudokus. And hearty congratulations to the 5 intrepid warriors who made it to the finishing line. I think we can allow 5 places on the podium just this once.

Thank you,

David McNeill.