WSC '11: update 1

So I’m a little conscious of having never gotten round to writing up a report for the Beijing sudoku tournament last May, so I’ve decided to try and proive quick updates as to what is happening in Eger as and when I get a spare moment to myself.

Travel (yesterday) was fun, but ended up arriving at Manchester airport in time for the flight, and minus much fingernail length. There was a lengthy wait on arrival at the airport in Budapest waiting for others to arrive, together with an even lengthier transfer from Budapest to Eger (go look it up), but in the end we arrived at the hotel safe and sound, meeting up with friends old and new.

The hotel itself is quite nice, although the room that I am sharing with puzzling veteran David McNeill can best be described as cosy – we’re talking a double room rather than a twin room. I had the pleasure of watching David solve in person the puzzle I posted on Friday, and as he toiled his way to the solution it was time to get some sleep.

On to today. There have been two rounds so far, and not a manually scribed digit made in anger. The first round we were presented with a booklet of 60 “puzzles”, except the grids had been filled out and you had to indicate whether they had been filled out correctly or not. This is easy when you spot an obvious error – but I have to confess to marking a few right which I wasn’t 100% confident on – I have a hard enough job spotting when my own grids are right let alone this variety of scripts, fonts, tallies, marks and so on. I wouldn’t call it a spectacular round for me, but I’m at least confident in all the puzzles I marked wrong.

Round two was a funny manipulative puzzle where digits were replaced by tiles with Hungarian landmarks – clues were printed on a rather large piece of paper with the idea being that the clues were all definitely wrong, but indicated that an edge-adjacent cell contained that picture. It sounds a bit of a nightmare, but I managed to get on a roll and finished the round with 7 minutes to spare, which is hopefully quite good. But yet it might be completely wrong – the problem with this puzzle being that each digit you placed then obscured some other clue so you can’t really see if you’ve contradicted yourself along the way. Fingers crossed eh?

Anyway, whatever. It’s hard to judge how things are going so far, especially given these first two rounds aren’t weighted very heavily in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, all being well I have made a very solid start. The next round will involve some actual number placement (gasp) – a round of 22 easy classic puzzles and 45 minutes in which to solve them in. I suspect the Jakub O’s of this round might have this done in closer to 30 minutes, but I reckon this round is finishable for us mere mortals too, all being well. More to follow!