I see that July 5th was the last time I posted. A lot’s happened since then. I stopped my ridiculously bad run of errors in the LMI Copy Paste test, had a more than decent performance in Fred’s novel Heads or Tails tournament, but still managed to have a bad bad day in the competition that mattered most this month – the Times Sudoku Championship.
The finals are this Sunday, and I’m quite disappointed to say I didn’t make it. The Mumbai rounds were highly competitive, and since the sudokus were mostly easy, one mistake cost a lot as there were numerous people finishing them before time and getting bonus points. As it so happens, I ended up making not one mistake but 3. The first round consisted of 6x6s, and anyone who finished 7 out of the 8 in the given 15 minutes would advance to the next round. And thus, 1500-2000 participants got cut down to 108. The next 2 rounds consisted of first 4 classics and then 4 variants in 30 minutes each. In the classics round, I finished 3 of them in 6 minutes, and was looking at a hefty bonus. But the remaining one turned out to be pretty tough, and I must have kept repeating a mistake somewhere because thrice I thought I’d finished it, and found a repeat somewhere.
This meant I knew I had to go for broke in the variants round. The variants consisted of Trio, Odd Even, Alphabet, Diagonal. I made a mistake in Trio and thought I’d corrected it, so went on to finish the round in 11 minutes, 2 minutes slower than Rohan Rao’s 9 minutes which was the fastest time for the round. I had a projected score at 71 points. It turns out this would’ve been enough to take me to the finals, but due to a silly mistake in the Trio(For some inexplicable reason I’d changed a correct solution into a wrong one thinking the other way round) and 2 unfilled cells in the Alphabet, I lost those points and my bonus, which kicked me all the way down to 14th. So.. I’ll have to wait for next year to be on the Indian Sudoku team again. Good thing I’m at least on the Puzzle team.
Now to the present. This blog hasn’t had an update in a while. This is because I’ve been preparing puzzles for something else which has also gotten delayed due to the above. But anyway, I had a bet with a friend recently, and made some quick easy Tapas to win it. The bet should vaguely become apparent looking at the puzzles. Just thought I’d while away a day or two more by uploading these, since I didn’t know exactly what else to do with them. These are below.
Moving on, there’s an LMI monthly puzzle test this weekend. Logirace features known and new loop-types. All loop fans should enjoy this one.
Also, I’m not numbering these, not sure why. Maybe because most of them are really easy. They’re in the order in which I made them, if that is of any interest. Enjoy!
PS's puzzles + 