http://logicmastersindia.com/SM/201509/score.asp

The Neighbours round had 348 participants including 129 Indians. 117 Indians solved at least one Sudoku correctly.

Congrats to Rohan Rao, Jayant Ameta and Kishore Kumar who are the top 3 Indians in this round. Jayant has posted a very impressive score on a contest which was tougher than Round 1 going by the standings. Please improve on the consistency, Jayant :) Rakesh and Rajesh completed all 18 Sudokus before time too, bringing the total to 5 finishers. That's 8 less than the previous round, and a little below the ideal target, probably.

In the International standings, Timothy Doyle (France), Seungjae Kwak (South Korea) and Jakub Ondrousek (Czech Republic) who are the toppers, but Nikola was very close with just 34 seconds separating him from 3rd place. Kudos to Rohan who finished 5th, just ahead of some excellent solvers like Kota, Tiit, etc.

This round is the first of many where we tried to include an inexperienced author with an experienced one. A bit of background on Aditi Seshadri - she is the Bangalore winner in the 2015 edition of our youth competition, Sudoku Champs. She was part of the U-18 team which represented India at the World Junior Sudoku Championship and won a silver medal. Aditi herself stood 9th in that competition. For this round, she contributed the first 3 6x6 Standard Sudokus and the 3rd 9x9 Standard Sudoku. Side note - She is NOT my sibling :)

This round seems to have some mixed results. I think it became divided into solvers who are good at Repeated Neighbours and solvers who aren't, to an extent. Also, the Classics were easier than the ones in Round 1, which contributed to more beginners solving a bigger number of Sudokus. I think that's a good thing but ideally, you don't want one difficult Sudoku being the decider between top ranks.

Rishi Puri test solved the set and his total time is around 39 minutes, which is around the same as his time of 37 minutes for round 1. This just illustrates that, if you know how to go about the variant, they should get done quickly. I did have an idea that many may not know how to approach the variant, and that the results may look somewhat as they do, but I decided to go with it anyway because the technical difficulty was still according to format restrictions, and also because, in my opinion, Sudoku Mahabharat should have an aspect of learning new techniques through experience.

The late change to the Quadruple rules wasn't ideal, and was mostly my goof-up because I assumed the rules covered what I had already created, until I realized they didn't. Changing the Sudokus at this point would mean re-testing, changing the points distribution, and changing the Sudoku across PDF + Online interface, and in a rush that just means susceptibility to errors. So changing the rules was the better option. While it did make the Sudoku harder, I don't think the rule concept was that hard to digest, or that it necessitated a significantly different thought process.

There was also discussion about the theme being represented. While I don't think we will be changing the variants for this round in future SMs, I think we can work on making our definition of the term clearer, or using 'Neighbourhood variants' instead of 'Neighbours'. We'll look into that. Thanks to Richard and Rakesh for bringing it up.

All in all, I hope everyone enjoyed the Sudokus, and got a smile at the end ;) Thank you all once again for participating and we hope to see you soon in the Number Placement Round of Puzzle Ramayan by Deb, which is the closest that PR puzzles will get to Sudoku, and then in the Odd Even round of SM by Swaroop and Ashish.

In the meantime, I'll post the Repeated Neighbours walkthrough sometime later tonight.

Here is a very rough walkthrough for the crucial steps in both Repeated Neighbours. Post here if it is still unclear, try to pinpoint what is unclear.



Attachments
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RepeatedNeighboursHowTo.pdf (137KB - 63 downloads)

Real gem creation Prasanna, Thanks for such wonderful walk through.
I could even able to solve Monster from your blog (https://prasannaseshadri.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/puzzle-no-415-repeated-neighbours-sudoku-daily-league/) after this wonderful explanation, real quick.

Please allow us to submit the answers even after the event is over. Some of us, are not able to solve within the prescribed time and during the event. But if we are able to solve at a later stage, it would still give us some satisfaction