To participate in the monthly contests no separate registration is required. Since you are already registered here in LMI, just logon and and you can participate.

It is advisable to play sudokus offline (i mean by taking prints of the pdf), especially if you are a beginner. Balnk screens etc are local computer problems which can be sorted out by refreshing the page or by logging in again.

Or, it could be a software issue as well in your computer (Adobe Flash player). Only sudoku tests will have the puzzles appearing on screen and that too, not all tests.

Haha ! too many mistakes for me on the 4 classic sudokus ! Must now wait till the end to play variants...

Oh I didn't see the link for the variants. I can play now

Edited by Fred76 2012-07-25 6:12 PM

Yes, the Variants have a different link. These 2 rounds are independent of each other.
I think top players like you should start both the rounds at the same time and have a maximum submission time of 40 minutes.

We are seeing some good participation. Thank you everyone who have participated so far.

Request to players, especially the new ones, to leave any kind of feedback here so that we can improve the future contests.

i guess the puzzles are still a bit tough ones...it could be better if slightly easier puzzles with 6 in each round would be better so that most players can atleast finish half..

btw why is prassanna's score not showing if he has solved the puzzles??

Prasanna and Tejal were the test solvers. Thats why their names are missing.

In the results page,

http://logicmastersindia.com/BeginnersSudoku/score.asp

I can see a button "Claim Score" for one of the puzzles I have solved and the points for that particular puzzle has not been added to my total score as well. When I try to press the button and submit, I get an error - "Error occured while connecting to server".

What is this button "Claim Score" meant for? Is there any issues currently?

If you think your solution is correct, but you are not given points, you can use this button to communicate with the organizers.
There was a problem with this button, it is rectified. Please try now again.

Thanks for the clarification ... Indeed, my solution was wrong ... Solved it correctly now :)

I find very good response to the beginners contest....40 plus Indian participants have played.....May I request especially new comers to play...this is a really good contest.....

LMI tournaments are very impressive and hard, often frustrating for Beginners or slow players like me.
I hope these contests will be suggested again ,It 's also a good training against the stress of the stopwatch .
Thank you for this great idea

As the home page suggests, this is scheduled at least for the next two months, and the plan is to keep it as a monthly thing just like the traditional monthly tests.

We have noticed that many participants are using the "claim points" button for every wrong submission. This button is only to be used if you feel you have solved the Sudoku correctly and have made an error of some sort while entering the answer key. All other claims will be rejected. Once you have submitted please check your solutions for errors before claiming points, else its really a waste of time.

I cannot participate in the Sudoku contest as the puzzle is not opening. I tried clicking on the reset button by pressing Control Enter but its still not happening. Please help me out. Thanks.

Send us a screenshot - logicmasteradmin@gmail.com

July Beginners' Contest is over. We are trying to filter out some results (like the one in the attachment)





Attachments
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AmazingTime.png (7KB - 6 downloads)

Based the number of participants (314 participants, 204 non-zero scores, 203 Indians), we can very well say that lot of participants are looking forward to "easier" competitions (compared to, for example, the monthly tests). We will continue to hold these Beginners' contests as frequently as we can, but not certainly more than once a month. At the same time, we expect some of these players should try the monthly tests as well. Most, if not all, monthly tests have some basic sudoku types as well as some easy sudokus.

Now back to July's results - obviously jaku111 and kimking solved the 8 sudokus in incredible time.

We have not defined (not sure if it is objectively possible to define) who a beginner is - any suggestions welcome. However, we are pleased to announce the top 3 debutants.
They are, in order :
Manuj Arora (manuj) - India
SUDOMICH - France
ARCHANA TAYADE (ARTAYADE) - India

Congratulations everyone, and thank you for participating and making it a success.

Please share any feedback you might have (except that the Classics were tougher than the Variants :-)

First, I would like to point out that the variants were clearly easier than the classics. Don't know if this had been said before.

(sorry)

Seriously, I think the very high indian participation proves the attractiveness of such easy tests. The 40' length is certainly a good thing too for some beginners who may be afraid of two hours contests, or are not yet passionate enough to spend that much time solving sudokus. Definitely a good initiative to pursue.

Happy to see fellow Sudomich doing well; he has been solving classic sudokus for a long time now, but has only recently entered the variants world. Clearly he is the type of player to who these tests may be useful.

Thanks to LMI team once again !

This is an important topic. While we've acknowledged the debutants, thats a really narrowed down scope. In any case, the 3 mentioned above have done really well even if we consider some definitive way to determine who is a beginner, and I believe their scores show they're ready to keep a solid target of solving a good chunk of a Monthly test too. The point here, other than giving the beginner something interesting to tackle, is also to give confidence to the ones who do well that they can move to the next level. So for that we need to acknowledge any beginner stepping up, not just the debutants which by definition is a one-time thing.

Anyway, congratulations to Manuj, Sudomich and Archana for some really impressive performances. I met Manuj in the Mumbai round of the Times Sudoku Championship, and his score was really impressive. Its good to see him replicate that here.

Edited by prasanna16391 2012-08-01 4:43 PM

I think that every contestant should have enough self-reflection and could decide whether he is a beginner or "professional". Before starting the test everyone should submit the proper button with these two choices. We could not decide whether the contestant is experienced enough.
Here in Slovakia we have 2 categories in every sudoku tournament - A for the experienced puzzlers and B for the beginners and recreative solvers. The solver who win two of five tournaments is automatically transfered into the A-category. Maybe that is why we have large amount of unexperienced puzzlers visiting our tournaments. They never have embarrassing feelings about being overrun by the strong competition. But there is another question - is the goal of LMI organisers to have two separate scorecards?

Allowing a participant to choose is good, but there still needs to be some limit, since some really good solver who is relatively new(say few months or so in) can still consider himself "inexperienced". But it is a valid idea nonetheless.

As for separate scorecards, that is a possibility. We are trying to give the Beginners a level of competition among themselves. Obviously top solvers like this as practice too so a division would be nice. But we'll need to make sure the categories are definite. Your suggestion is good in that respect.

Also I would like to add few words to the competition. Before the test I thought about the system of submitting answers. I usually submit all solved puzzles and then have 5-8 minutes to "solve" the rest. The biggest disadvantage of this system is that I often missed the time limit and could not submit all the puzzles. But this time I realised that 40 minutes are enough to solve and submit everything. There was also no necessary to speculate on the order of puzzles to solve (this is my another bad habit). But after the test I was quite surprised that 8 puzzles from the top10 have submitted their answers continuosly during solving. Only I and Bastian did it after solving everything. However 6 of the puzzles at positions from 11 to 20 used the way of one submission. Whereas the differences among the top 20 (or among the 3 and 20th position) were very close it seems so that the continious submitting is more suitable. It would be interesting to know how many players of these used the online solving mode, because I suppose, that the great majority of "one submission players" use this way.