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 :)

As everyone knows , the grids of Fred shake the neurons .. ....Ah !Ah ! but we like our agitator of brain, of course !!!



That's very kind of you to prepare the grids for (the past) and next Edition of Lmi beginners.
Thanks to the authors , we make progress .
Thank you very much.

Nice clean sudokus, thanks for the puzzles Tom. :)

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So 5 minutes 36 seconds is the time to beat.

Edited by debmohanty 2012-12-13 5:05 PM

Nice sudokus, Tom. Thanks !

My pleasure. I hope everyone's neurons have been tickled, rather than shaken, so far :)

Thanks for the puzzles

Nice puzzles! I had a horrendously difficult time with the Outside until I noticed that I had failed to use one of the clues. The classics were all pretty nice puzzles, the no knight was rather clever, and the killer was really beautiful but I think pretty difficult for a beginner contest! It took a while to see how to make use of the layout most effectively.

In first , the possibility of playing online is really comfortable with the zoom , I see as well as a mole !!!
Thank you Deb .
I thought that I had no chance I never play untouch , anti knight and killer , but the grids were very nice , not easy but not too difficult .(I confirm tickles only...Ah!Ah!)
unfortunately about the killer (I confirm more that tickles in spite of 15 in the middle) ..... I close my mouth because I played as a smurfette , to the right ...to the left ....etc but never at the right place !!!!! result.....far too many time .
The classics were great especially the third and the fourth .
Thank you Tom

Edited by distri 2012-12-16 4:23 PM

All of the puzzles were very nice, though I broke the Killer a couple of times, gave up, came back the next day, and solved it. Also, I spent a few minutes staring at a nearly-completed AntiKnight puzzle before realizing that I had forgotten to use the 2 in the bottom-centre grid.

December Beginners' Contest is over now. Passwords removed from booklets.

adityasaraf007 and khuski move to seasoners after Decembers contest.

I guess I'll had some of my own thoughts, as Fred did last month.

Classics: in general I quite like writing easy classics as you can really put a lot of thought into the design. With puzzle #1 I was hoping to get the digits 1-8, rather than 2-9 around the edge of the puzzle, but sometimes it doesn't quite work out like that. #2 featured some diagonal stripes - and this meant there were very few opportunities to put singles into the puzzle. Instead it was more profitable to solve by focussing on one or two digits at a time. This was supposed to be true of #3 as well, but it turned out even easier than that. I was astonished to see several sub-minute solves, with some as quick as 40 seconds! #4 was supposed to be a little trickier, and is based upon a favourite design of mine. I've used it in tests before, and as perhaps die hard fans of my blog will tell you, is (almost) the pattern I used for my first ever puzzle!

Variants: sometimes you just throw down a design and see where it gets you. With the added constraints that a variant can give, you often have a puzzle that needs very little tweaking. You can clearly see this is what I was after with the untouch puzzle. I was hoping not to need those digits in the 5th column, but didn't quite manage it. The killer was my favourite of the lot. Actually I was a little dopey when initially sketching out the cages and left blank spaces at R1C5, R5C1, R5C9 and R9C1. When I came to extend the cages that now contain those cells, I found that the puzzle still solved perfectly well. A pet hate of mine with killers is where you have to do too much adding up. I guess you have to do a bit to get yourself started here with the "cross" in the middle, but I much prefer to rely on logic that involves restricting a cage to a potential set of numbers and then using them as mini extra regions. So once you worked out how the L shaped 16 and 17 cages in the middle interacted, you were well on your way to solving. I suppose the outside was probably my least favourite of the set. I can't say I'm totally in love with this variant, but I tried to give a good clean solve and leave things well presented. The unfortunate thing with this sort of variant is that often you can miss the significance of one particular clue and be left scratching you head for a while until you come to re-examine it. Finally the anti-knight. I initially tried a design very similar to the untouch, but couldn't get it to work. In a fit of desperation (it was getting quite late that evening and i wanted to finish everything off), I had a look at Fred's completed grid from last month, permuted the digits and gave it a rotation, and then sketched out a striking design which I thought would solve uniquely. Without too much tweaking I got what I wanted. There are lots of subtle interactions with the antiknight logic for certain cells in the grid, and so if you knew what you were looking for the solve was fairly straightforward.

Anyhow, I hope everyone enjoyed the puzzles, congratulations to the winners, and my thanks to LMI for giving me the opportunity to showcase some of my puzzles :)

Tom

Thanks Tom for providing a nice set to solve. The detailed post about creating the grids is really interesting and useful too.

Anyway, the top 3 Beginners are zbych (Poland), DavidCollison (UK) and elena_tens (Greece). dp_94 had the best Indian performance among the Beginners.

Among Seasoners, no one got close to the fairly early "time to beat" set by jaku111 (Czech Republic). Timothy (France) and Gotroch (Czech Republic) are the "best of the rest" with 2nd and 3rd place respectively.

Congrats to all the winners, and thank you all for participating. :)

About Untouch Sudoku, can identical digits touch each other "diagonally"?
I can understand it's not allowed (by observing the Example), but I think some "beginner"s can't.

Yes, it's meant that they can't touch each other diagonally.

Well ... "diagonally" is the only way identical digits can touch each other in a Sudoku

[ Added the missing word in link for types. It was already present in pdf. ]

Heading of the contest page needs an update. It reads date in Dec.

Why it doesn't let me to print variants??

@TiiT, please check my messages

I would like to know if anyone has attempted correctly the 'Killer' sudoku in variants in LMI beginners' test, january. If yes, can anyone tell me the correct solution for the 'Killer' sudoku in variants. I have attempted it and think my answer is correct. But the server is showing the answer to be wrong. My answer is O-564782391 and P-327941865

Edited by huisouvik 2013-01-20 2:59 AM