Let me give some tips which will help to identify the pairs from the given shaded cells.
Odd Path: Both the ends of this path will be odd.
Even Path: Both the ends of this path will be even.
Renban Path: Maximum length of Renban path can be 9 cells as it can contain at max 9 different numbers.
Palindrome Path: Both ends of this path will be same digit.
Incremental Arrow: This is very interesting path. This path requires some home work to be done. Here are some observations regarding incremental arrow path.
Thanks to Prasanna for these tips.
a) Longest arrow path which can be formed with 5 as starting is 5831459437.
b) All even incremental arrow that is longer than 4-5 cells has to the recurring chain e.g. 2684268.......
c) All odd is not possible to go beyond two cells.
d) You can get recurring chain staring with 13 e.g. 134718........
I hope these tips will help to get started with this Pathway Sudoku.
All the best to the participants :)

Re a), aren't there four different paths of that length? 5831459437, 5493257291, 5617853819, 5279651673.

I get two repeating chains (2684... and 134718976392...), and eight maximal finite chains (four short even ones 246, 482, 628, 864; four of length 13, which extend the four paths above to the left by three digits.

The test has started.

For a) I meant that if the arrow sequence starts with 5 it can go maximum upto 10 cells.
Thanks for explaining in more details about other arrow sequences.

Agreed - the IB is truly terrible. It would have been trivial to highlight the paths in the solution, and it wouldn't have been much more effort to explain which path followed which rule.

Thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle!! I found it difficult but very engaging. Examples of paths in IB would have been good though.

Agreed, a lovely puzzle. Thanks to the author and organizers.

Yes the paths would have been nice to have in the instruction booklet, but it's really not a big deal, easy to figure out by trying to solve the example. And I can see how marking all variants of the paths could have been messy, or misleading if just one was marked.

Fantastic construction and good puzzle Rajesh.I presume it must have been painstakingly long to design this grid .I was surprised seeing my standing in the results as I didn't particularly expect to do it well given that I couldn't even complete the IB one. But it went great and was fun solving the contest. I greatly enjoyed how paths interweaved between grids and how the incremental arrow path travelled such far.At some point, understanding the global logic like how the OL path had to go around the COL path helped greatly and it was enjoyable seeing these steps.I can understand why this was rejected for WSC (possibly due to round time constraints).Only negative about the whole contest is that time must have been spent framing the IB rules as it was too vague and could have encouraged more participation if it only had been more clear.

I don't get any password for sudoku booklet. logged in my account several times but same result.

You need to click on "Start pathways" to get the password.

Congratulations to all 32 finishers!

Congratulations to deu, Kwaka, sugitakukun, Nikola and TiiT for finishing in less than 100 minutes.

Among Indian participants, Congratulations to kishy72, mjaipal and Anithra for taking the top 3 places.

Special mention for rob who was the first to complete.

Thanks Rajesh Kumar for the puzzle!

Participants may share feedback in this thread.