I've wanted for awhile to write a 24H Puzzle Competition round and simply not had the time to put it all together, particularly with all the other things I am doing. Fortunately Team USA, lead by Palmer Mebane and helped by Wei-Hwa Huang, got one together this year and I contributed 25% of the puzzles. With three different authors and three ( Read more... )

I know everyone has been anxiously awaiting these results from Virginia. Congratulations to Carolyn Offutt (1st), Lindsay Cooper (2nd), and Anne Etter (3rd) for their results at the 2nd Arlington Puzzle Festival Sudoku tournament. Here are the puzzles I provided, for three 20 minute rounds and then one live final on stage ( Read more... )

This weekend is the second Arlington Puzzle Festival. I once again have created the sudoku tournament puzzles. So if you are in the Virginia area and in the mood for a competition, go check it out ( Read more... )

This has been a quite busy and stressful month for me; if you look at this puzzle you might think I'm living 24 hours at a time, with my problems multiplying every day, but that might be reading too much into things.

This week I wanted to revisit a great puzzle type Grant Fikes created for the USPC (before I pre-released one here before the test ( Read more... )

With last week's logical masterpiece that matched some of the harder designs from The Art of Sudoku, here are three visual themes (with some logical consequences) that also appeared on the 2012 US Sudoku Qualifier. The inverting diagonals was my favorite of the new designs (most often I use strict ascenders and descenders) as it placed interesting ( Read more... )

For those that haven't picked up my book The Art of Sudoku, this is the kind of tough, hand-written challenge you can find there. After writing enough sudoku I learned how to embed not only particular logical deductions throughout a grid, but also how to set up "Just One Cell"-like stopping points that really allow just one path forward. This ( Read more... )

All my writing on competitions makes some people think I'm an outspoken idiot, even though I honestly think I am right on many things which are true organizational mistakes.

So, I do enjoy the opportunities to show off how much during a WPC I can actually be an idiot by airing my Dirty Laundry ("mistakes" that rob me of better finishes). These ( Read more... )

This is not a post for discussion of overall WPC comments, good and bad; this is a post where I simply want to tell the story of what may go down as a risky, multi-dimensional chess play from Ulrich Voigt that played to his advantage on the way to another WPC title. I hope to never see this format again, but it leads to an interesting story of the ( Read more... )

The afternoon rounds brought the Anthology round, with 20 puzzle types, one that appeared on each of the past WPCs. Many stand out from their championships, but others are just odd selections. For the Turkish year, for instance, the type is "Yajilin" which is not even a puzzle I can place, probably because I think it was only in the sprint round. ( Read more... )

ETA: So I had what should have been a good Day 1 but for my classic "dirty laundry" mistake of a wrong puzzle in a round I was counting on a huge time bonus. 57 points went away just like that. And I'm also frustrated, with so many new puzzle styles, that the written rules for some of them are unclear to me and I didn't even solve the intended ( Read more... )