Good selection of puzzles - the variations were eminently enjoyable. Thanks to all the authors for this test.

This puzzle is a whole story by itself, so I will keep quiet till the test is over, but reading the word "amazing" from Serkan is for sure a huge satisfaction and reassurance.

Thanks ! (and indeed, thanks to the team for having encouraged me to keep this puzzle)

I dont like tests that are too short. I generally prefer longer tests.
I dont like tests with puzzles that are too complex or very difficult to understand and implement.
I dont like tests with puzzles that are difficult to solve and need a lot of guesswork.

Spring test is just the type of test that I love. A little lengthy, beautiful sudoku variations, some new, some standard variants, some tweaked variants, absolutely fun-guaranteed test. There are some things I want to tell, but I have to control myself till the test is over :-)
And a silly stupid mistake cost me Double Sum's points. Been very erroneous in the last few tests :(

But, great work by the team!

Thanks Rakesh and Rohan. We tried to make this test as fun as possible, and your comments tend to confirm that we did achieve our goal.

By the way, Rohan, I totally agree with the three points you exposed, so it is quite reassuring to see that, according to you, the test didn't fall in one of these traps. Looking forward to have some more detailed impressions from you (of course, even bad ones, if there are).

Really fun test with some great puzzles. Lots of creativity with great theming and a few phenomenal variations. My only possible complaint is that the dark green is a hard color to write on/read but it was still nice to see so many different ways to welcome Spring.

The new answer submission system was also a great improvement, so thumbs up all around.

I'm sort of a mathematician, and I think I proved it (albeit via brute force). At least with the sun in the middle 2x2 cells anyway...otherwise I think it's relatively easy

Look forward to taking this test after dinner!

Yes, it's implied by the fact that a ray of one-cell length is not really relevant !

Some of the puzzles were very well done... others such as the Jigsaw Wordoku are a pain in the ass when you are solving it with a keyboard. I didn't like the double sum sudoku either which isn't the kind of puzzle that's easy to do online with all of the ifs and thens involved with solving it. I didn't like that it could appear to be right until you got to the end and reached a contradiction, and using the letters on the sides made it unnecessarily confusing, when numbers on the side would have been sufficient.

Again, I think the puzzles should not just be designed for people who solve them on paper, but also for those who solve them on the site and don't use photoshop or other picture making programs to help you make enough notes to make it solvable.

David, we take note of these remarks. Even if we knew from the beginning that the test is both for online and paper solvers (we are familiar with the site, I played some tests with the interface), we may have a bit forgotten this constraint when creating the puzzles, concentrating only on the spring theme and some interface limitations deb talked us about.
We didn't thought about the fact that it's not very convenient to solve online a grid with letter inside, for example.

We hope that, however, you enjoy the other puzzles, on which you demonstrate you are one of the best player over the world.

Fred

Indeed, outside letters are less practical to use than numbers and we knew about it, but they are here on purpose.

As Fred just said, we didn't really think about the practicity of solving the "letters puzzles" online. We focused on several other aspects of the test in order to make it as convenient as possible (also for online solvers), but unfortunately we forgot some of them. There is always room to improve the system...

I thought the paper submission thing worked very well. Sadly as I was waiting for everything to print out I did the classic in the web interface and somehow managed to lose my answer by the end of the test. Never mind.

For what it's worth I thought the set was set at just about the right level. From a designers point of view, everything was very pleasing. Sundoku is a lovely idea, the classic solved really nicely (remarkably so for a classic), and the Sudokurve was very creative. This is without mentioning the excellent challenging puzzles at the end of the test haha!

I also solve the puzzles online and I agree that Jigsaw wordoku was difficult online. I eventually broke this puzzle after spending a lot of effort. But I thought the solving experience in Double Sum Sudoku did not suffer even if you use the online interface. Using letters or numbers does not make much of a difference as the reference was shown next to the sudoku grid. If anything, the killer was a bit problematic for me at some places, as the '0' candidate in some cells was overlapping with killer clues. I had to restart the grid from scratch as I missed reading a zero while solving.

But the overall experience from the test was a very positive one.

Last night my friend was giving spring on my system, today when i am trying to login through my account, even after my login when i go to spring sudoku it says 'vibhor87 has completed spring' which is my friends login id..
what should i do about this

Delete the Cache on your comp and try logging in again...

Rishi

Please check your inbox

i did clear the cache dis tym, but even that doesnt help man!!!... do something i seriously wanna try this level

From the database, I see that you've started Spring. So I hope the issue is resolved.

One request - In this forum, please write in proper English. Some of us are much older than what you might be thinking. I especially have lot of problems understanding this sms-like language.

Mind blowing.........great test..........
This new submission system is excellent.

We identify this little problem with Deb, that appears on each test including a killer sudoku.
If someone has an idea to improve the system for killer sudoku, you can speak we Deb, he'll be happy

Fred

Thank you, Neeraj !

A great set of puzzles.... after a long time something which made me think for a long time... A few of the puzzles were simply superb... great job Authors...

rishi

What can I say ? A big thank you for these kind comments.

=> Thomas : My bad about the dark green. I am the one who designed the puzzles and I couldn't access to a printer before the test, so I couldn't exactly figure out what the color would look like. I keep the remark in mind for future tests with colored puzzles.

=> Tom : We went through several doubts concerning the overall difficulty of the test ; before the start, I was a bit afraid that it could be "too easy" ; then I saw the first results and it appeared that, on the contrary, it was probably slightly too hard. So it is good to read that some top solvers have found it well estimated.

=> Rakesh, Neeraj, Rishi : I am really happy that you liked the test. It is always difficult, when you build puzzles according to a "theme", not to fall into the trap of sacrificing quality for aesthetic. But of course, that is what makes the construction of such puzzles interesting.

Yet a few hours before the complete results...

Ah - well that'd certainly be my advice to any would-be test creators. Your own puzzles are almost certainly harder to other people, and so any test you put together will be harder than you think it is :). (Unsurprisingly) if you'd taken my test times for the UKPA sudoku I'd have ended up significantly quicker than far better solvers than myself.

Besides, I think if you concentrate on making hard puzzles, rather than creative puzzles, you won't end up with anything particularly good. I believe the author has to have some fun too!

We applied a little different method for testing than usual, for this test, I'll explain that tomorrow if you want

I am well aware of that ; each time I organize a tournament, I take this fact into account... and every time I realize, once it is over, that I nonetheless underestimated the difficulty. Fortunately, we were six authors this time, so we had a more global vision (and yet, the test was a bit hard...). And I just see that Fred proposed to tell you some more tomorrow, so I am gonna shut up now.