"penalty award" - is that an oxymoron !!

Thanks for another good beginner's contest. The half credit for late submissions to encourage everyone to work all puzzles is an excellent idea.

Beginners Contest for October is over.
Password removed from the pdfs.

Congrats to hjkl18(Czech Republic), momiji(China) and mtgs(UK) for topping Beginners' Contest October. Among Seasoners, F4han(Malaysia), jaku111(Czech Republic) and janoslaw(Poland) top the standings.

Out of 116 Beginners, 102 solved at least one sudoku correctly, and the corresponding numbers for Seasoners is 156/164. Its pleasing to see so many non-zero scores, as that was the main aim with the extended time idea. We have received some good feedback on this, including a comment above, but we welcome more feedback on this and any other aspect of this month's contest.

Thank you all for participating!

Something I'd like to add separately -

There has been some curiosity about the author of these contests. The author so far, barring the one noted here, has been Deb. But, we encourage other authors to contribute too. Obviously, by now, the difficulty expected in these contests is known. The technicalities are -
1. These authors won't be added/updated on the author's page, but they will be given credit on this topic.
2. If at all someone would like to author a Beginners' contest, contact me/Deb and we will let you know the variants for that particular month.

We're pleased to announce that Fred Stalder(Fred76) has already offered to author Beginners' Contest November.

mtgs will be moved to Seasoners category after 2 scores of 75+.

what makes a person disqualified ?i see a person disqualified in the list...what might be the reason?pardon me if i m touching on sensitive topics..but i m curious ..apart from posting ridiculous times like 0:01 for solving all sudokus which happened in the previous month ,does solving all in under 15 or so min warrant a disqualification just because the person might be a beginner?

It is always a difficult decision to disqualify anyone, beginner or seasoner. We discuss it multiple times internally before finalizing anything. I'm not going to share those most-difficult-part-of-administering-online-puzzle-tests here. But "solving under 15 minutes" is not a criteria to disqualify anyone.

Since you are curious, I'll send you an PM regarding why we had a disqualified player this time.

Haha, I'm joking, of course ! I'm glad to have the honor of creating the grids for the next beginners contest !

Fred

There is a small change in image format for the Consecutive Sudoku that appeared last month. Instead of dots, bars will be present between consecutive digits.

I just registered on the LMI site. Could you please tell me where do I get puzzles to practice for this month's beginner's challenge.



Also, could you please share any link on the format how this tournament will be conducted.



I am sure this must be there on the site but being a newbie I am not sure where it is.

For practice you can view the previous Beginners' Contests here - http://logicmastersindia.com/BeginnersSudoku/?test=B201210 . The new types, Outside and No Knight Step(or Anti Knight), can be found, along with other variants if you look through the Monthly Tests, or go to the blogs/sites provided on the links page - http://logicmastersindia.com/home/?g=links . Out of the sites Fed Sudoku, Sudoku Cup and Argio Logic have online solving.

As for format, once the contest page link is shared, there will be a section there giving details of how to use the interface/make submissions. The basic summary is -

You have 40 minutes of "official time", during which you can either download and print a PDF, solve on paper and submit the rows or columns that the arrows show, or you can solve online itself. With each submission the Instant Grading will let you know if you're right or wrong. If wrong, you can re submit but you'll get a penalty of 1 minute added to your time taken for each wrong submission. You may submit after the 40 minutes are done till the contest dates are over, but you will get just 50 % of the points then.

Thanks a lot Prasanna. That was exactly what I was looking for :)

Score page link is now activated - http://logicmastersindia.com/BeginnersSudoku/score.asp

It looks like some players, especially the ones solving on paper, are submitting all Sudokus at the end. Please remember that the points are halved after 40 minutes. So if you have solved some sudokus before 40 minutes, it is important to submit them before the 'penalty period' starts.

what is the password for opening the document

It is written in red right below the buttons 'start classics' and 'start variants' after you have hit such a button.

Beginners' November is over. The top 3 Beginners are hjkl18 (Czech Republic), DavidCollison (UK) and lukasz6500 (Poland). hjkl18's highly impressive runaway performance means he now has 2 consecutive top performances on these contests, and will be bumped up to the Seasoners' category because of this. adityasaraf007 had the best Indian performance among the Beginners.

Among Seasoners, jaku111 and Gotroch make it a Czech 1-2, with Kota finishing at 3rd place.

Thank you all for participating, and thanks to Fred Stalder for providing some beautifully constructed grids. On a personal note, the Outside 1-9 theme was my favorite :)

Thanks Fred for writing the Beginners contest. It certainly helps me a lot, when I don't have to write 8 sudokus every month

With a highest score of 110.65 (compared to 126 in Sep / 118 in Oct), this contest was certainly more difficult even for top solvers. Some of the puzzles were time-consuming to fill so many digits (Outside / Consecutive), if not very difficult. The result was not completely surprising, in fact Fred and me were mostly expecting it. At some point before the test, Prasanna even had suggested increasing time limit.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that beginners shouldn't get demotivated if they scored less in this test compared to previous ones.


Edited by debmohanty 2012-11-16 10:40 PM

Just a few words about the puzzles:

Classics: Not lot of things to say. 4th sudoku was the hardest, with a naked single in R8C2. Once this found, it doesn't require hard step, but the logical path is narrow, so it explains surely that some players spent some time on this one.
I hope that you have seen what I tried to do aesthetically on these grids.

Variants: I was asked by Deb and Prasanna to create a 7*7 toroidal, a consecutive sudoku, an outside sudoku and a killer sudoku. After test solving the set, we found that it was a bit too difficult compared to previous tests, especially killer sudoku. I could have created an easier one, but I don't find very exciting to create very easy killer sudoku. In my opinion, killer sudoku is not an easy variant, and even the easy ones, without hard logical step, take some time to be solved. So we decided that I create another variant: It seemed more appropriate to create an easy antiknight sudoku.

Toroidal sudoku: Most of the time, I like to create toroidal sudoku with the same shape for all regions. This is perhaps because it's impossible with irregular sudoku that I find it interesting.
Outside sudoku: I feared that it could be hard to create something aesthetic for this one. In fact, that is the first outside sudoku I created. I didn't want to put digits inside the grid (otherwise, why name it outside sudoku), and I didn't want to have too much digits outside the grid. I decided the 1-9 stuff for the upper side and right side,and tried to have no more than 2 digits for each row/column in the bottom and left sides. This construction has the effect that the end of the solving is the regions 2,3,5,6. The hardest steps here were two pairs (13 in region 2 and 89 in region 6), that make the puzzle rather medium than easy. (The players that took part in the last WSC know that it's possible to create hard outside sudokus !)
Consecutive sudoku: I chosed the theme being my name's initials: FS. I constructed the puzzle trying to have these letters clearly visible, so trying to have the least possible of consecutive digits outside of the digits making the letters. I tried to "push" the consecutive digits in the regions 3 and 7, where I also placed the digits.
The puzzle doesn't need some hard step to be solved, but it is also, as the outside sudoku, more a medium one than an easy one.

Finally the antiknight sudoku. I think it is not hard, but requires lot of placement using the antiknight rule. The hardest step was to find the pair 25 in region 2 due to the antiknight placement for the 5.

I hope every player have fun, especially those who spent lot of time (spending lot of time without having fun is not an ideal entertainment) !

Fred

Reading you would be the author of a beginners contest, I already thought it would be harder than average. I thought the same during solving. I was very much aware of the ability for naked singles, so I didn't find the 4th sudoku harder than the others.

For the variants, I can confirm some bottlenecks you described; the pair 13 in box 2 in the outside sudoku was hard to spot. This one certainly took most time. The consecutive was not that hard. The long series in column 7 provided much info, and the absence of a lot of bars means you often have to place two consecutive digits with one cell in between.
I have almost no experience in solving anti knights. For your test I practised a few, and learned some typical tricks, most of them being elimination steps. That helped, and I found the pair 25 pretty soon.

I had a lot of fun with the puzzles. Also afterwards, when I noticed my relative good scoring. But during the test the same feelings crossed my mind as Deb wrote above.

Anyway: thanks for the test!

I certainly have a tough act to follow in Fred, but I've tried my best to put together a nice set. I don't think it will be quite as challenging in difficulty as November! I suppose if you look at my blog you'll see I haven't posted sudoku variants for quite a while, so it was lots of fun putting some sudoku together for a change. Hopefully you'll see that when you get to solve the puzzles :)