After a long wait, LMI April Sudoku Test is over.

We had some excellent performances at the top.
Thomas blew through the Sudokus in 90 minutes, and Jan completed in 101 minutes. Nikola completed in 108 minutes. They complete the podium for April Sudoku Test.

7 other players completed all sudokus in 120 minutes, and at least few more were close to complete all, most notably Timothy. The score page is indeed top-heavy.

Among Indian players, Rohan was the only one to complete. Rishi made a mistake (typo again!) in Trio and messed up with Product, otherwise he was close too. Gaurav (participated out of the official ISC window) solved 12 puzzles correctly to complete Indian podium.

Overall we had 268 players, out of which 209 players submitted at least one Sudoku correctly.


Test Solvers
Many thanks to Branko Ceranic (skywalker) and Gülce Özkütük (suboree) for pretesting all the Sudokus, and also testing the web interface before the round started.

Excellent set of puzzles. Killer and Product were too good.

Edited by rakesh_rai 2011-04-25 5:50 PM

I found it strange that you always start with the most difficult puzzles (or you simply want to grab the highest pointers?)

This time, it was not planned. After I started the test, it takes some time for the sudoku grids to become visible. It just happened that I was scrolling up and down to find any grid which comes up first. Killer came up first - so I started there.

Also, most of the times, I do not try the remaining grids after the test. So, for me, its ok to miss a small pointer than a high pointer - as the maximum enjoyment would be after solving these high pointers.

Normally it is always beneficial to start with high pointers if we are not sure of completing all the puzzles in the test.... I try that too ... but if the variants are all known and if I feel I can complete all then I simply go in the order...

Thank you for this wonderful test !

Grids were very nice, I really enjoy to solve them. It was the second tournament of the day for me (after french prequalifs), and I'm happy to see that I can be competitive during 4 hours in a day. (certainly an important thing for competitions like WSC, where I haven't any experience).
Regarding LMI tests, I was impatient to find again a place in the top 10 on a test. As I was tester in January and Author in March, I had only the awful result of February test...

About grids: extraregions, consecutive, outside, inequality, irregular and killer enjoyed me particularly, as they were so nice and well constructed. All grids were good. The Product Frame was very tough, I have to redo it, because I couldn't solve it without a guess (of course it was wrong 1rst time, I think I spent something like 20-25 on that grid in total).

It's good to see that Janoslaw is back ! 4 times world champions taked logically the first two places. Thomas had a comfortable +11 minutes advance. Behind them (-> Human people ) , it was very tight between Nikola, Kota, Michael and Hideaki: only 1 minutes 39 separates these very good players.

Thanks again, I have so much pleasure to compete on LMI !

Fred

guys, can some one help with the link for French pre-qualifiers

Edited by utkaarsh 2011-04-26 5:52 PM

See here

thnx deb

Hey Fred, you missed about some more good players: Minfang Lin, Rohan Rao, Fred Stalder and Sinchai R, who also completed the set (in a more humanly time ;-) )

You are right, these players are good