How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
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
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

Got a bit stuck initially, but enjoyed solving post hoc. Good set of puzzles !

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
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
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
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
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

@ admin. i just submitted my answers around 3-4 minutes back . but had forgotten to log in. please do the needful.

Not exactly sure what that means. I can see you have got 65

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	representation could have been better
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	representation could have been better
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Average
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Average
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little

Can X take a value > 90?

X Takes a value > 90 in PR rounds and
X < 90 in SM rounds

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little

I'm not quite sure what is trying to be achieved with the 50% easy, 40% medium, 10% hard distribution - the last few competitions have felt very disjointed with many puzzles you can breeze through before getting held up by one or two much harder puzzles. My personal preference is to have a much more even difficulty level.

This is to take nothing away from the individual quality of the puzzles - in isolation each was very nice!

Updated Sudoku booklet uploaded - password removed and solutions appended.

Leaderboard updated too.

Congrats to Kishore, Jaipal and Rajesh for the top Indians and to Tiit,Kota and Nikola for the top international players!
I really enjoyed creating this set, and personally liked it much better than most of my previous sets I've authored on LMI.

There is some feedback on sudokus being hard. Yes, that was intended. Since this is mainly targetted for the Indian audience, we are trying out different approaches to see how best to expose and challenge the players with different sudoku variants. When we initially started SM last year, we had a thumb rule that Classics should be ~ 20% of the points. It worked really well in my opinion. Now that we've changed the scoring system to normalize the points, tests can have varying difficulty without much effect on the score distribution of players across the rounds.

(1) Some of you voted for 'representation could have been better' -- Any comments on this will be helpful. Though, its likely the question is misunderstood :-)
(2) Many of you voted for 'too many hard puzzles' -- Totally understandable.
(3) Most of you voted for 'very nice puzzle quality' -- Thanks for that and glad you liked it.
(4) Few of you voted for 'many puzzles being worth too much or too little' -- I disagree here. If you look at the score-page and sort by # correct submissions, it is almost in reverse order of points. Which is the ideal scenario!

I also realize (4) can be interpreted in multiple ways:
-- Easy puzzles had more points and hard puzzles had less points
-- Very few puzzles contributed to large proportion of points and too many puzzles contributed to less proportion of points

I'm not sure what players are thinking while choosing this, but we expect the first one. Any feedback here will be useful. We might change the wordings :-)

Overall, I'm glad most of you enjoyed the puzzles. Nice to see 340+ participants with over 100 Indians.
Looking forward to the next SM round of 'Outside' by Rishi.

I think this is the right way forward - i.e. different rounds having different difficulties. Having all easy sets (like last year) will eventually be monotonous in my opinion.

I think both of your "alternative" interpretations of 4 are far more valid than the one you seem to have picked Rohan. What you have written implies that rational solvers should be naturally discouraged from trying harder puzzles because there is less chance of them finishing them and claiming the points. Which seems to run entirely contrary to the idea of exposing newer solvers to these harder puzzles, which is presumably what this 50/40/10 distribution is all about.

Aahhh, I see what you mean now. This is a valid point. In fact, this did come out when we were discussing the format of the rounds internally, but that was over a year back and things have changed since then.

Thanks for bringing it up, we'll think through this and hopefully have better rounds in the remainder of the series.