This test's grids were indeed computer generated, so the difficulty may vary; however, the types of puzzles were chosen by myself.
Anyway, it's my LMI debut as an author of a monthly test, thank you for whatever you have done for this test.

Thanks for sharing this info.I invested a considerable amount of time solving IB sudokus and I got stuck in many.Even after sharing this in a group, there were still many left where none could find a continuation.So, I was left wondering if there were givens missing or if the IB sudokus were test solved.

Now, about the contest, No touch and Irregular really killed my performance as the combined time I invested in these two is approximately 45 minutes and that involves an unsuccessful attempt at irregular and multiple guessing in no touch (after a miserable attempt to find logic).

My feedback about the contest is that if majority of sudokus are computer generated, then a caveat maybe given in the IB which states something like "Sudokus may not be logically solveable " . This has even a precedence in a WSC (2010, Philadelphia) where there was a hard classic round and apparently solvers were advised before the start of the round that sudokus might not be completely logically solveable and can require bifurcation.Personally, I am not fully against computer generated sudokus.However, just like others, I too prefer human made much much more.So with a warning like I stated, it gives solvers a huge amount of flexibility. Instead of sticking to a rigid approach of finding logic (like what I adamantly did during the contest) thinking that there must be one when there very well might not be (atleast by human standards), they can quickly take a guess too.

My favourites from the contest are Killer followed by NC.Thanks Huang Yi for your contribution! Hope to see more chinese hand crafted contests, as I am a big fan of chinese authored sudokus be it CSOCs or the ones posted in FB daily league.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
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
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Killer Sudoku

Thanks for the contest. I enjoyed the some what large sized formatting of the cells. The double and killer were my favorites. I am curious about the logic used to solve the treble.

I'm actually relieved to hear that the Instruction Booklet problems were computer-generated. I was having a very difficult time in solving them, and not enjoying it. I liked the competition puzzles much better (so far!).

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	A bit skewed
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
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Too few pages / too small grids
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Diagonal Sudoku

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
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
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Killer Sudoku

Congratulations to Tiit Vunk, Tantan Dai and Nikola Zivanovic for taking the top three places. Amongst Indian participants, Congratulations to Prasanna Seshadri, Kishore Kumar and Swaroop Guggilam for taking the top 3 places. Of the 180 participants, 48 were from India and 24 from Japan. 1 participant completed the set within the allotted time.

Thanks Huang Yi for the hard puzzles!

Participants may share feedback on the results page and rate the puzzles on the contest page.

The scoreboard will be finalized over the weekend including "no penalty" claims and bonus for puzzles 12-13.

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Nonconsecutive Sudoku

Am I the only one who don't get enough information from the feedback summary page?
Which set of puzzles did you like the most? There are 5 choices, but diagram shows only 3 colours and it's quite difficult to tell what colour is what.

TiiT

True. The colour shades have ended up as the same for three choices. While we will try to fix this, you can get more information (currently) by hovering the mouse around the pie chart.

Solutions Booklet: http://logicmastersindia.com/lmitests/dl.asp?attachmentid=766

Just to say thank you to the author, I had fun with the left-over puzzles afterwards, they all seemed to have logical solutions. Well-chosen!

I hope you don't take the criticism here to heart too strongly. While I personally have a preference for hand-constructed puzzles that many here likely share, well-edited computer-generated puzzles certainly have their place. From my experience constructing Sudokus, I also suspect that quite a few established constructors use at least some computer help, particularly when it comes to getting classical Sudokus with non-elementary logic out, or when constructing variants with strong but intractable constraints (non-consecutive, etc.).

Personally I'd be happy to take part in a seond instance.

Edited by rob 2019-02-23 12:33 AM