Will it be possible to solve them online, like in the Mahabharat competitions?

Yes, online solving will be possible.

We always enable online solving when standard grids with usual rules are involved.

For the Renban puzzle, I think it would be good to have a precise definition of "group of shaded cells". The example requires cells which touch only diagonally to be considered as part of the same group for a unique solution. As the groups may not always be visually obvious, a tighter definition may help.

You're right. The instructions can be more specific.
But, we won't make any changes to the IB / PB. I can assure you the 'groups' are very clearly identifiable in the PB.

The test has started.

Are there any tricks to solving these puzzles? Aside from the fact that they are all classics, of course. The reason I asked is that for at least half of puzzles, I have got the answer keys by only solving part of the puzzle.

No tricks, maybe the AKs are badly chosen then. In general, for easy Classics its hard to chose good AKs since people tend to concentrate their solve towards the AKs and get them without solving much.
Anyway, this is just a fun sprint test :-)

Haha, that was not at all what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it. Thanks Rohan!

Awesome refreshing sprint test, Thanks Rohan :) First time felt i gave my best with no pauses and hickups :p .
Of course that was kind of surprise but lesser than last year's 1st april day :p
Enjoyed all puzzles but best was inequality :)

Surprising and interesting! An excellent idea - especially the "surprise" sudoku ;-)
Thanks Rohan!
Henning Kalsgaard Poulsen

Real surprise...enjoyed thoroughly...:)

I wrote sudokuw like these before, so I actually knew from the IB that all the types could potentially be reduced to classics.
Given the test started 1st April, I was expecting exactly this, so I didn't bother printing them out.

Turns out to be a bad choice since solving online is much much slower :(

Oh well, happy April Fools everyone!

i am not being able to connect. it says "connecting to server to get status". please help

Finally scored full points for the first time. Took me almost 20 minutes to realise that it was all classics in disguise. Wonderful set of puzzles rohan. Was stuck in odd even for quite sometime . i think odd even took me the most time. Quite happy with my performance

Such a letdown.

Aside from struggling with resolving a few of the killer sums (my best type!), I found this to be a pretty brisk solve -- and amusing too. Thanks much Rohan!

The April Sudoku test is over now. Overall 255 participants and 101 got bonus points.

Congratulations to jzverina, deu and jaku111 for the podium finish.

Congratulations to the India Top 3 as well: Prakhar, Kishore and Rishi.

All Sudoku's were nice.Starting 15 minutes of the test are quite good for me except the diagonal sudoku but after that I got breakdown in killer sudoku and done some silliness in surprise sudoku which I paid off as 5-6 minutes more to my timings.

This time few players from India only 65 participated since
from the IB its like full variant test but a suprise classic sudoku test.Its good if classic sudoku test like this difficulty held at least a month.

Best thing about the test is the password "LuckyYou".

Not able to start the test

All of the puzzles were extremely nice. After solving 2 puzzles, I checked all off them and got that all puzzles are classics and the most surprisingly was the 'surprise' one that was also a 'classi'c.
By the way happy to finish on 4th from India and first time in top 10 from India in any competition. Could make to the podium if did not do 'diagonal' wrong in first submission.

Edited by sanket.saxena 2015-04-07 5:46 PM

It was my first completed puzzle set. I was easily able to solve all the sudokus and did not commit a single mistake once, so was able to do it in time. First time, I have been so flawless in solving sudokus. So, I would like to know if the difficulty level was lower than regular LMI sudokus?

Edited by Yajendra 2015-04-07 6:17 PM

Congrats to Jan Zverina, Hideaki Jo and Jakub Ondrousek for the top-3 players.
Congrats to Prakhar Gupta, Kishore Kumar and Rishi Puri for the top-3 Indian players.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso.

Few months back, a couple of my friends created some sudoku variants and asked me to test solve them. It was their first try at creating sudokus and they did quite a decent job, since they were all unique. Only problem was, all the variants could be solved like Classics without having to use the variant rule and I had a hearty laugh while solving them. For example, there was an Odd Even Sudoku with 42 givens... a Non-Consecutive Sudoku with 33 givens... etc. :-)

That's how the idea was formed for this test. It was subtle April 'fooling', unlike last year's total surprise (which was awesome in its own way). Thanks to Deb Mohanty and Prasanna Seshadri for test-solving and other inputs and 'contributions'. Incidentally, 13 is my favourite number and this also happens to be the 13th test I'm authoring on LMI. I'm happy many of you were able to complete the test and get the bonus, it was intentionally left longer and the difficulty such that a large portion of solvers would finish.

Thanks for all messages, and hope to see some more exciting Sudoku solving in the months to come! :-)

Turns out to be a bad choice since solving online is much much slower :(

Would anyone told me the password for this test and September test?