Congratulations to Rishi, Fred and Jakub H. for topping in Renban Grouped Sudokus.
Rishi continued from his great performance in Hotpot (where he stood second behind Thomas S.) and finally, we have an Indian at the top of the table.
There is very little to choose between Fred and Jakub with only few seconds differentiating them.

Nice to see Rohan completing all the grids well ahead in time.

deu, cpickerel and willwc played really well to complete all the grids.

Few more players had chance to complete all the grids, but minor mistakes crept in (especially Jason who lost the 2nd place because of a mistake in 6X6 Symmetric Unequal)

188 participants, and 167 non-zero scores - both better numbers than any LMI Monthly Sudoku test.
Thank you everyone for participating.

Please share your feedback about puzzles and / or rate them, if you have not done so yet.

Zafer, thanks a lot for the wonderful sudokus. I'm sure everyone enjoyed them.

Also thanks
to Ours Brun, who pre-tested the Sudoku, he completed all the grids in very impressive time.
to Rakesh Rai for reviewing the IB completely.
to David for designing the test logo.
to Rakesh, Rohan and Tejal for taking the test earlier in the weekdays, to find out potential issues because of our recent database upgrade. Fortunately, there were none.

Rather surprisingly, the two most error-prone sudokus were both 6x6 - non touching and symmetric unequal.

It is indeed little strange. Also the low pointer, Shifted Sudoku 9X9, is solved by very few participants. While viewing 'live' results, I could see that among those who solved it, most players skipped this Sudoku in the beginning and returned to it at a later point in time.

I always attempt such sudokus (like Shifted and toroidal sudoku) in the end, which usually means I end up skipping them because the timer runs out anyway. I think the main reason is that these require you to think "unnaturally". So you postpone it for as long as possible.

Maybe, we can have some contest in future with only such variations....then there is no escape.

Hi to all,

Thanks for positive feedbacks I'm glad most of the puzzlers enjoyed this renban concept
inside sudoku grids. Knowing these renban groups and the candidates for digits inside these
groups your solving speed increases I think. So it won't be wrong to think that they are like
catalysts for complete solving process for a grid. Classical sudokus and variants have different
constraints which limit the possibilities for a single cell and with the help of renban group contraints
these possibilities become more restricted. These are my thoughts about renban groups.

all puzzlers for participating. I want to congratulate also Rishi, Fred and Jakub H. for topping
Really well done.

Thanks to LMI for hosting this competition, Bastien VIAL-JAIME (aka Ours brun) for test-solving the grids (and also amazing timing), David Millar for designing this very nice logo which fits well for the renban concept. I also want to thank Deb Mohanty for all kinds of support and help about the test.

Regards,

Zafer

Edited by zhergan 2010-11-15 12:46 PM

Zafer,

Thank you for producing a beautiful set of puzzles. I found the logical process of solving these very original. Also rather slow compared to many others, but it was thoroughly enjoyable. It was nice to have some rarely seen (by me) Sudoku ideas like Diagonally Non-consecutive and Argyle take their place in this contest. Congratulations to setter, testers and speedy solvers.

I have to say that I didn't like the new results page. Too much of a tease for my liking. I'd rather know nothing (apart from my own score) until the contest is over or else see all the scores like before.

David McNeill.

Thank you everyone for your feedback on the new results page. We wanted to have a bit of surprise, which resulted in this experiment (and thats why it was not announced in the forum earlier)
It has received mixed reactions in this forum and also in other forums (ukpuzzles, sudokuvariante.forumactif.com)

For the next test, we hope to change it to what most players would want to see.

I did this and never got back round to finishing it during the time (solving unofficially after everything had finished). As I said on our own boards, it certainly didn't feel like it was worth only 2 more points than the classic!

Congrats all round, firstly for the organisers in hitting a record turnout, and secondly for Zafer for providing an entertaining set of puzzles!

Too bad I couldn't start in time. I was doing pretty well for the 50+ minutes I had to solve.
The shifted 9 by 9 wasn't hard per se, but all the openings lay in the wrapped around nonets and were easily missed. I found the symmetric unequal hard to see. also messed it up it seems.

Thanks to Zafer for organising this wonderful sudoku test. Grids were nice and I liked the concept of "renban groups" (which I didn't know before).

Thanks to all LMI team, which allows such tests to take place. I don't know why, but I can do very good results on this site .
Because of the new result page, I really believe I was 1rst, seeing all these famous players behind me , but it misses one name: congrats to Rishi, very well played !!!

The only disappointment was the low participation of members of french forum "sudokuvariante". Even so I had opened a topic and made the announcement on the portal, and Bastien said grids were beautiful and not too hard...


Fred

Fred - read about your strategy (solving 9X9 grids first, and then 6X6 grids) in sudokuvariante.
Very interesting indeed, given that some of the 6X6 grids were high valued

In Hyderabad, all solvers got together to solve it. It was really nice meeting other solvers and discussing strategies post the test.

The Venue was Euro School (run by Jaipal ). Best part was we had 9 new people participating.. 7 school children and 2 teachers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Before we got to the test and while we were waiting for other solvers, we had a nice interactive session wit hthe school children and teachers where we discussed the variants and how we can solve them. The enthusiasm shown by the kids was really great to see.... Neeraj, Jaipal and I spent some time with the kids and they loved it....

Post the tst we all sat down and discussed how each one of us went through the puzzles and the approach adopted. The school management was happy with the interaction and so were some of the parents who had come with the kids... We are planning to have more sessions with the school kids and are working out details how to improve their interest in the game and make them solve more...

Thanks to Jaipal for arranging it and the lovely lunch...

Rishi

Congrats to everybody, particularly Rishi, Fred and Jakub H. of course.

Thanks to Zafer fo this nice set of puzzles, none of them was really hard but I had fun on every grid, which I really appreciated.

And, again, thanks to Deb and whole LMI team for this great job. You really do a big work to make sudoku evolve and gain popularity.

Here is a screenshot of the results of the school kids who attempted the Renban... It was a mighty effort from them, keeping in mind that they were looking at variations for the first time ever.... With regular practice I am sure they will climb the results ladder.





Attachments
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HydResults.png (22KB - 3 downloads)

It is interesting to note that most kids solved the NoKnight Step Sudoku (apart from Classic). Some kids solved the Diagonal as well.

Before the test when we were having a session with the kids... Diagonal and AK were the most discussed... The kids understood the concepts very well too and hence majority attempted it.

Nice to see this kind of enthusiasm. Hope to see more of this in future.

You guys should plan to have one in Mumbai / Pune region. Target for December Sudoku test (around Xmas)