Again Team UK (and here I make the succinct point that we were most certainly not Team GB when our star solver was Northern Irish) gathered for dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. Now was the time for the promised pork and dumplings – but as it turned out it was a little of a let down as it came served atop of a huge mound of pickled red cabbage. It’s not as if I’m not one for vegetables, but really there’s only so much vinegar the uninitiated stomach can take. I had another go at the world record sudoku, seeing if I could get into it logically. I did indeed spot a swordfish (the first step in the scanraid solve incidentally) but it gave me no further information. Perhaps I was just tired. Perhaps it really was a monster!
I headed upstairs to the room to grab a quiet 45 minutes to attempt to regenerate. I tried out the various TV hotel channels, coming across things like Bloomberg, CNN, BBC world but eventually hit the jackpot when I found Eurosport with some of the world championship snooker. I managed to catch the last of O’ Sullivan’s title bid, as he went out to Mark Selby. Perhaps I should rewrite my previous analogy for Hideaki Jo! Anyhow, the time soon drifted on to 9.30pm and it was time for the “special programme”.
Nothing initially seemed to be going, and I found myself in the company of US captain Nick Baxter and two-time champion Thomas Snyder – who was solving one of his own puzzles that had appeared in some Japanese puzzle book. His mood wasn’t particularly great – reflecting the underwhelming quality of the puzzles – but he had had a fantastic round A, which given the weightings of the rounds seemed to be the key to a good overall score. However, his eyebrows were raised as the results of round H (the “playoff”) came out. He had made a transposition error and had 6 digits out of place. Even worse, was when he examined my script. I had (in spirit) got the right answer out, but had inexplicably written a 5 in as a 9. I had been given the points. On a comment after his blog post Thomas has alluded to a paper that was marked correct when it wasn’t – and I can exclusively reveal that that was me. There, I’ve outed myself to the puzzling world.
Worse was to come as I mentioned to the pair of them that at least Team USA were very well place in the team competition. Thomas had been on leg 2 and had actually solved the puzzle just to the left of Satan’s 240V iodine secreting rusty jagged testicle vice – thus setting up Team USA as the only team to have finished the relay. However it turned out that there had been a mistake. Although Thomas had equally (in spirit) solved leg 2, he had inexplicably written in a 2 as a 3. And whilst it was nice to know that I was in good company, the gravity of his mistake completely outweighed mine as it meant that the US only scored points for the first leg – the same as the vast majority of the other teams. I thought it prudent to scamper off and join the rest of the Brits.
The special programme was remarkable in that political correctness was thrown out the window. Random competitors were drawn out and the girls competed in putting makeup on a boy’s face; whereas the boys were left to peel potatoes. Utterly surreal if you ask me – but the real Ricky Gervais moment was to come when they were all asked to dance to The Blue Danube waltz – and it turned out this was a little bit too much for the personal faith of the Turkish girl. The “little final” came and went and to be honest I can’t remember much about it. And just as I thought my limits of the surreal were pushed to the limit, it was time to start a round of competitive sudoku. At 11pm.
Round K
Entitled nightmare in Zilina, basically these were 6 hard puzzles, which noone got done in the hour. There was a killer puzzle, which I didn’t do because the cages were dotted in a way as to obscure the visuals of the puzzle, a rock hard diagonal which I had to guess at and even a slightly mental 9×9 puzzle that had split cells so actually you had to put in numbers 1-13. However my enduring memory of the round was the so-called halloween puzzle. Basically an alphabet sudoku (with a fiddly non-adjacent rule to allow for the repeated letters), I started solving and got to a point where I had a non-unique solution. This – especially after round E – made me very angry and I left a rather rude message for the organisers on the paper. One of the translator people – also acting as invigilators – saw this and gave me a wink…this was just as well as I had missed the constraint which said that the word “halloween” had to be visible in the grid. With that satisfied, the puzzle came out uniquely. I quickly erased my rude message!
Anyhow, after that round was all said and done, I was faced with the question as to what exactly do you do at the end of a sudoku solving day that spans the best part of 15 hours? The answer is of course obvious. You go to The Pub. Joining me in the panorama bar at the top of the hotel bar were David, Ariane, Michael, Jason and Times journalist Jack Malvern. The bar itself was something else – stuck right in an 80’s time warp with disco lights, and a singer who was doing her best to croon out tunes that if I’m being totally honest belonged in a porno. On the other hand the 80’s theme was going down very well with Jack and Jason. I could only feebly protest that actually I was born in 1986!
The intention had been to stick around for a couple of beers – and this initially seemed to be the case as David and Michael rather sensibly slunk off to bed. However, the magic word tequila soon got aired, and before we knew it three shots of the stuff had appeared in front of myself, Jason and Jack. This evening was beginning to get epic, as Jack got in a round of shots – Ariane joined in this one – and the fun really began to get started. Some drunk Slovakian came to sit down with us, mumbled something incomprehensible, and then took off to the dance floor. The main moves he and his chum appeared to possess involved sliding about on the floor a lot.
Meanwhile, the people behind the bar had taken a shine to us and were bringing over free shots for us. These were all of completely unknown origin, and we had no hope of identifying them. The most memorable of them was called “the embryo” and essentially did look like an embryo in a shot glass. I’m sure it must have been egg or Bailey’s or something but for all I know it could have actually have been the unspeakable! Now, this was all a little interesting from a personal perspective as it was getting quite late and I was getting a little drunk, and I had to be up fighting fit for a probable World Championship Semi-Final in the morning. However, there was just time for one more round of shots. Absinth.
All that needs to be said on the matter is firstly, that Jason had never had absinth in his 30+ years – which I can only surmise is because the stuff might actually be banned in the US, and secondly this wasn’t the mincey-faggot 50 or 60% volume stuff you get over here. This was the real deal, brought over by the barman who performed the beautiful ritual of burning sugar over the drink. Knocked back down in one was a real eye-opener, and it was perhaps for the best that the bar shut there and then. Although not without a cameo appearance from a statuette of a rather darkly toned saxophonist, which I think we named Tyrone. And with that I’ll end this entry.
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Monday, 4 May 2009
WSC Zilina report part 3
We sat down to eat in the hotel restaurant as the full eight of the British contingent. After more than three hours of puzzling in the morning we were very hungry and the menu presented in front of us promising pork and dumplings sounded very promising. Then we turned the menu over to see what the lunch options actually were. In the end I made a very safe call with the chicken – but David was a little more disappointed with his choice. Actually watching David eat is a remarkable experience – obviously his voracious solving appetite transfers over to a voracious appetite, and his solving speed transfers over to seeing a clean plate soon appear. The (rather sparse) beef he plumped for in the end was “nice whilst it lasted”.
After dinner, everyone retired to their rooms before the afternoon puzzling session kicked off. However, I elected to read my book in front of the big TV in the hotel bar. There was some tennis on, and to my extremely mild disappointment pretty Slovakian girl seemed to be losing to pretty French girl. C’est la vie. After a while I was joined by Mike, who it transpired was also a maths graduate. Pair this up with maths finalist Nina and soon-to-be maths fresher George an a common theme soon pops out. This is not to be read as sudoku having any mathematical content whatsoever – my theory is that simply maths students have an exceptional capacity for logic. We were later joined by the rest of the team, and the time we thought we had went by far quicker than we had thought. Time for the team rounds – where the great UK A vs B rivalry would begin!
Round E
The first of the team rounds was split up into puzzles E.1 E.2 and E.3. The first was a multisudoku – three linked puzzles; the second an “eightdirections” – think a sort of crossword with prescribed strings of digits to be place in the grid; the third was a classic sudoku, but with the ambiguity of the 8’s and 9’s being replaced simply x’s. With three persons per team this sounds simple enough but the twist came that the three pieces of paper we were given were labelled E.a, E.b and E.c – each with a third of the three puzzles on them. In the rather unclear instructions, I had gotten the impression that drawing blank grids to concatenate the information from each paper was forbidden – but I looked over and saw the Czechs doing it we did so too to speed the solving process up somewhat.
The versatility of our team soon came good. When the multisudoku had been cracked, leaving 3 individual puzzles I took over when the others were struggling (being arguably the best at solving hard sudoku). I soon found why the others were struggling – the multisudoku had multisolutions. Michael’s talents were more suited to the eightdirection – however it was to transpire that this too had multiple solutions. George took on the x sudoku, and solved it without much incident – which made a change!
Frankly, to have puzzles with multiple solutions in a world championships is a little bit unforgivable.
Rounds F & G
For these two rounds, we had to decide upon an order on which we would be solving puzzles. For UK B this would be Michael first, then George and then me. Round F was called musketry – and basically the puzzle was akin to a samurai sudoku with 5 linked grids – however they were in a + rather than an x formation. This allows a lot more interaction and so can be clued more sparsely – hence giving a much harder puzzle (A standard Times samurai takes me 10-15 minutes by myself). We would be given 10 minutes solving the puzzle each before we had to pass it on to the next person. As the person on the last leg, I received the puzzle about half done. I stared at the thing for a couple of minutes before realising that if I was going to get it done, I’d be having to guess. I did so. I guessed wrong. Nil points. This was alright however as very few teams actually did get it out in the 30 minutes. Still, if I thought I was feeling a little helpless then the best was still to come…
Round G was a relay in which puzzles were to be solved individually, and one at a time. When one person was done with a puzzle then they tagged the next person in the relay in and they could start their puzzle.
Leg 1 was some sort of weird origami paper folding 8×8 sudoku. Michael nailed this; I believe he was probably the first in the room to get it done, well within 10 minutes. At this point I’ll stress again Michael’s incredible logical and analytic mind which allows him to crack new and unsudoku-like variants. With a little more (not that he’s slow mind you!) solving speed and he’d be a really formidable solver.
Leg 2 was taken from just to the left of the 240V iodine secreting rusty jagged testicle vice in Satan’s torture cabinet. In essence, you were given a blank 9×9 grid, and expected to fill it up from a choice of 18 (incomplete) 3×3 boxes, in order to put together a valid sudoku which could then be solved. Whoever decided not to test solve this round – thereby ensuring this puzzle wasn’t ruled out as being totally unsuitable for a championship – needs to be introduced to the instrument just to the right of this jigsaw sudoku.
George must have had the most time spent on this of the room and was nowhere near finishing it. Nor were most of the other teams in the room – consequently most leg 3’s spent an hour doing nothing. Ridiculous, and totally unsatisfying. It turned out leg 3 was a pretty hard puzzle too – whereas legs 4-6 would probably have taken 10 minutes combined. You really have to wonder.
Round H
So after a personally frustrating team performance, it was next time for an exclusive “playoff” round for the 29 best performers of round B, the symbollogy round. At stake? A place in the “little final”. The point of this round? Who knows! Well – very limited amounts of bonus points would be the actual answer. However it strikes me as very odd to set up different rounds where not everyone could participate, whose purpose was to award points that were ultimately not going to make much of a difference anyway. If they wanted to award bonus points, they should have just done so at the end of round B.
Deep Breath – I shall continue.
I was the only member of the UK team to make it through to this playoff, and ended up being a little late to come forward to the front. This turned out to be a bad thing because it became clear I would be sitting surrounded by 3 very able Japanese solvers. To my immediate left was Yuhei Kusui – 2nd in the world in 2007 and 2008 – a truly top-drawer sudoku solver. He is also the most charming person you could ever wish to meet, and was the only one of the three who could speak any English. In front of him was Hideaki Jo, one of the world’s premier puzzle solvers. It’s probably fair to say that sudoku are a relative “weakness” for him – although to clarify, that’s a bit like saying Ronnie O’ Sullivan has a “weaker” left-handed game – it’s still better than pretty much everyone in the world. The third of the trio was Ko Okamoto. As things would transpire, he’d actually finish above the previous two – needless to say my surroundings were nothing short of formidable.
Anyhow, it turned out that I did get the puzzle out, but I was 11th quickest. The top 9 went through to the little final. By this stage I didn’t really care anyway – I was more than ready for dinner, as were most of the other people in the room fed up with being excluded. I managed to get across my point to the Japanese guys that I thought things had generally been too hard – they understood this and nodded vigorously. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that Hideaki Jo had already independently identified me as a fellow nikoli.com solver when I tried to introduce myself!
The length of this afternoon session post probably reflects that this was the lowest point of the championship for me personally – so well done for reaching the end of this entry…
After dinner, everyone retired to their rooms before the afternoon puzzling session kicked off. However, I elected to read my book in front of the big TV in the hotel bar. There was some tennis on, and to my extremely mild disappointment pretty Slovakian girl seemed to be losing to pretty French girl. C’est la vie. After a while I was joined by Mike, who it transpired was also a maths graduate. Pair this up with maths finalist Nina and soon-to-be maths fresher George an a common theme soon pops out. This is not to be read as sudoku having any mathematical content whatsoever – my theory is that simply maths students have an exceptional capacity for logic. We were later joined by the rest of the team, and the time we thought we had went by far quicker than we had thought. Time for the team rounds – where the great UK A vs B rivalry would begin!
Round E
The first of the team rounds was split up into puzzles E.1 E.2 and E.3. The first was a multisudoku – three linked puzzles; the second an “eightdirections” – think a sort of crossword with prescribed strings of digits to be place in the grid; the third was a classic sudoku, but with the ambiguity of the 8’s and 9’s being replaced simply x’s. With three persons per team this sounds simple enough but the twist came that the three pieces of paper we were given were labelled E.a, E.b and E.c – each with a third of the three puzzles on them. In the rather unclear instructions, I had gotten the impression that drawing blank grids to concatenate the information from each paper was forbidden – but I looked over and saw the Czechs doing it we did so too to speed the solving process up somewhat.
The versatility of our team soon came good. When the multisudoku had been cracked, leaving 3 individual puzzles I took over when the others were struggling (being arguably the best at solving hard sudoku). I soon found why the others were struggling – the multisudoku had multisolutions. Michael’s talents were more suited to the eightdirection – however it was to transpire that this too had multiple solutions. George took on the x sudoku, and solved it without much incident – which made a change!
Frankly, to have puzzles with multiple solutions in a world championships is a little bit unforgivable.
Rounds F & G
For these two rounds, we had to decide upon an order on which we would be solving puzzles. For UK B this would be Michael first, then George and then me. Round F was called musketry – and basically the puzzle was akin to a samurai sudoku with 5 linked grids – however they were in a + rather than an x formation. This allows a lot more interaction and so can be clued more sparsely – hence giving a much harder puzzle (A standard Times samurai takes me 10-15 minutes by myself). We would be given 10 minutes solving the puzzle each before we had to pass it on to the next person. As the person on the last leg, I received the puzzle about half done. I stared at the thing for a couple of minutes before realising that if I was going to get it done, I’d be having to guess. I did so. I guessed wrong. Nil points. This was alright however as very few teams actually did get it out in the 30 minutes. Still, if I thought I was feeling a little helpless then the best was still to come…
Round G was a relay in which puzzles were to be solved individually, and one at a time. When one person was done with a puzzle then they tagged the next person in the relay in and they could start their puzzle.
Leg 1 was some sort of weird origami paper folding 8×8 sudoku. Michael nailed this; I believe he was probably the first in the room to get it done, well within 10 minutes. At this point I’ll stress again Michael’s incredible logical and analytic mind which allows him to crack new and unsudoku-like variants. With a little more (not that he’s slow mind you!) solving speed and he’d be a really formidable solver.
Leg 2 was taken from just to the left of the 240V iodine secreting rusty jagged testicle vice in Satan’s torture cabinet. In essence, you were given a blank 9×9 grid, and expected to fill it up from a choice of 18 (incomplete) 3×3 boxes, in order to put together a valid sudoku which could then be solved. Whoever decided not to test solve this round – thereby ensuring this puzzle wasn’t ruled out as being totally unsuitable for a championship – needs to be introduced to the instrument just to the right of this jigsaw sudoku.
George must have had the most time spent on this of the room and was nowhere near finishing it. Nor were most of the other teams in the room – consequently most leg 3’s spent an hour doing nothing. Ridiculous, and totally unsatisfying. It turned out leg 3 was a pretty hard puzzle too – whereas legs 4-6 would probably have taken 10 minutes combined. You really have to wonder.
Round H
So after a personally frustrating team performance, it was next time for an exclusive “playoff” round for the 29 best performers of round B, the symbollogy round. At stake? A place in the “little final”. The point of this round? Who knows! Well – very limited amounts of bonus points would be the actual answer. However it strikes me as very odd to set up different rounds where not everyone could participate, whose purpose was to award points that were ultimately not going to make much of a difference anyway. If they wanted to award bonus points, they should have just done so at the end of round B.
Deep Breath – I shall continue.
I was the only member of the UK team to make it through to this playoff, and ended up being a little late to come forward to the front. This turned out to be a bad thing because it became clear I would be sitting surrounded by 3 very able Japanese solvers. To my immediate left was Yuhei Kusui – 2nd in the world in 2007 and 2008 – a truly top-drawer sudoku solver. He is also the most charming person you could ever wish to meet, and was the only one of the three who could speak any English. In front of him was Hideaki Jo, one of the world’s premier puzzle solvers. It’s probably fair to say that sudoku are a relative “weakness” for him – although to clarify, that’s a bit like saying Ronnie O’ Sullivan has a “weaker” left-handed game – it’s still better than pretty much everyone in the world. The third of the trio was Ko Okamoto. As things would transpire, he’d actually finish above the previous two – needless to say my surroundings were nothing short of formidable.
Anyhow, it turned out that I did get the puzzle out, but I was 11th quickest. The top 9 went through to the little final. By this stage I didn’t really care anyway – I was more than ready for dinner, as were most of the other people in the room fed up with being excluded. I managed to get across my point to the Japanese guys that I thought things had generally been too hard – they understood this and nodded vigorously. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that Hideaki Jo had already independently identified me as a fellow nikoli.com solver when I tried to introduce myself!
The length of this afternoon session post probably reflects that this was the lowest point of the championship for me personally – so well done for reaching the end of this entry…
Thursday, 30 April 2009
WSC Zilina report part 2
So having got to bed sometime after midnight on the Friday, me and Mike (with whom I was sharing a room) roused ourselves at 7am. I am not what you would call a morning person – unless you extend that to (small hours of the) morning person – and so I was the last to join the rest of the UK team for breakfast at the hotel restaurant. My previous breakfasts in this part of world have generally involved sausages, bread and mustard (and occasionally beer) and the restaurant did not let me down here. Indeed it thoroughly improved upon the matter by providing baked beans, a rare treat outside of the UK! It was David I think that produced an interesting titbit of trivia that marmalade was going out of fashion with Britain’s youngsters. It is apparently our patriotic duty to keep this flagging industry afloat. I can only confess to being highly disappointed upon discovering there was none of Britain’s finest to ironically spread across the rather small croissants provided.
So onto the competition. Saturday’s puzzling was to commence at 9am and wouldn’t be finished until midnight – albeit with a few breaks around mealtimes – but which nevertheless represented a gruelling schedule.
Round A
So as things turned out in the general rankings, this was a fairly highly weighted round and if you wanted a top place you really needed to ace this round. Its format was solve as many puzzles as possible in two hours. There was a twist to this however – most of the variant sudoku towards the beginning of the round were linked to some classic sudoku puzzles towards the end of it, by virtue of a common square. Thus whilst a 4×4 “sudoku” with only a 2 and 4 given has rather more than one solution, with the information its twin puzzle provided narrowed things down a bit.
Actually, I believe this to be a really nice idea for a sudoku championship, however the execution was flawed in two ways: firstly it was implied by the instructions that the flow of information would be variant -> classic. This was not the case, and in some cases things even went both ways. Okay, so far, so mildly diabolically clever. The second flaw was that then a lot of the classic puzzles were computer generated in such a way that there wasn’t a pleasing and logically rewarding solution path so you were better off guessing to be quicker on most of them. The trouble here is that if you break one, you’ve probably then broken both puzzles which can lead to some pretty hefty write-offs, as Jason was to find out. As irony would have it, the two puzzles I broke on this round I hadn’t guessed on. C’est la vie.
Round C was a collection of four puzzles fitted together to look like a snowman. Why? God only knows.
This bad boy?
A Belgian named Vincent Bertrand made a very lucky guess early on and solved it in 3 minutes and 6 seconds. That time is just about as insane as the difficulty of the puzzle itself. As it turned out, Vincent is actually a top top solver anyhow, and the only possible thing you can take away from him in that a room of 130+ people guessing, one person was likely to get it quickly.
And having had our first introduction to the farcical puzzles, we adjourned for lunch. This entry has gotten a bit long so I’ll save the afternoon and evening for the next one. Things can only get weirder!
So onto the competition. Saturday’s puzzling was to commence at 9am and wouldn’t be finished until midnight – albeit with a few breaks around mealtimes – but which nevertheless represented a gruelling schedule.
Round A
So as things turned out in the general rankings, this was a fairly highly weighted round and if you wanted a top place you really needed to ace this round. Its format was solve as many puzzles as possible in two hours. There was a twist to this however – most of the variant sudoku towards the beginning of the round were linked to some classic sudoku puzzles towards the end of it, by virtue of a common square. Thus whilst a 4×4 “sudoku” with only a 2 and 4 given has rather more than one solution, with the information its twin puzzle provided narrowed things down a bit.
Actually, I believe this to be a really nice idea for a sudoku championship, however the execution was flawed in two ways: firstly it was implied by the instructions that the flow of information would be variant -> classic. This was not the case, and in some cases things even went both ways. Okay, so far, so mildly diabolically clever. The second flaw was that then a lot of the classic puzzles were computer generated in such a way that there wasn’t a pleasing and logically rewarding solution path so you were better off guessing to be quicker on most of them. The trouble here is that if you break one, you’ve probably then broken both puzzles which can lead to some pretty hefty write-offs, as Jason was to find out. As irony would have it, the two puzzles I broke on this round I hadn’t guessed on. C’est la vie.
Rounds B & C
I’ve paired up these two half hour rounds together, because already this Saturday report is getting a bit long. On the other hand it’ll give you a feeling as to just how gruelling a day it was! Round B involved three symbology puzzles – basically classic sudoku but instead with Mayan, Roman and LED digits respectively. The Roman and LED puzzles had a bit of interest in that given clues were not necessarily complete – so V might indicate anything from 4-8. My strategy here however was to transpose everything into familiar arabic digits and after solving rewrite in funny digits. This was fairly successful as two out of three successful solves meant I was to go through to an extra playoff round, which in turn might give me a go at the little final. What was the point of all this? God only knows.Round C was a collection of four puzzles fitted together to look like a snowman. Why? God only knows.
Round D
This was called “world record”. This is stupid. You cannot possibly hope to have anything like a fair world record for sudoku. There is no way to standardise a puzzle for comparison, which indeed is something of the appeal of the puzzle! Anyhow, what is more stupid is to then provide the hardest puzzle to ever appear in competition for this one off. Scanraid rated a typical fiendish puzzle from The Times at around 125, and a superfiendish at 225. This insane puzzle from last year in Goadescribed by Thomas Snyder as being turned up to 11 – in tribute to This Is Spinal Tap – could only manage a paltry 378.
This bad boy?
This scored 641. This is THE sudoku puzzle the devil would set you to solve to save your soul. Only if you placed a wrong digit, made by say a guess, Cerberus would be there ready to take three large bites from your arse cheeks. I have looked up what a “double-finned swordfish” is and one day I hope to solve this logically. In less than a week.
A Belgian named Vincent Bertrand made a very lucky guess early on and solved it in 3 minutes and 6 seconds. That time is just about as insane as the difficulty of the puzzle itself. As it turned out, Vincent is actually a top top solver anyhow, and the only possible thing you can take away from him in that a room of 130+ people guessing, one person was likely to get it quickly.
And having had our first introduction to the farcical puzzles, we adjourned for lunch. This entry has gotten a bit long so I’ll save the afternoon and evening for the next one. Things can only get weirder!
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
WSC Zilina report part 1
First things first. It’s probably possible to go on and on and on and on and on and on and on about the organisational flaws of the 4th World Sudoku Championship. On the other hand I am neither as prolific nor as eloquent a writer as Thomas Snyder so to go into as much depth again would be pretty fruitless from my point of view. Instead, I’ll go through my experiences in Zilina pretty much as-is, splitting things up into bitesize chunks.
The trip out to Zilina was pretty smooth. I set out from Coventry on Thursday afternoon, to meet up with Michael Collins, a fellow member of the UK “B”-team. His house is in London, and made for a convenient base to get to our 9.50am flight from Stansted to Bratislava. I was a little apprehensive of staying over with someone who I had only exchanged a few emails over, but ultimately both him and his wife were perfectly charming about my problem. In the morning, we drove to Stansted, and we were both a little confused as to why we hadn’t seen George Danker (the 3rd member of the UK B trio) and his girlfriend Sophie who was coming out to spectate. Nevertheless, just as Michael and I had taken our seats, George and Sophie entered the cabin, and we could reorder our priorities. Namely to get down to solving lots and lots of puzzles.
Once arrived in Bratislava, we met up with a chap called Stefan, a Slovakian participant who was there to help us with transfers. His English was pretty broken (although not as broken as my Slovakian!) but we got a bus from the airport to the railways station fairly easily – albeit if the route didn’t show us a particular picturesque view of the Slovakian capital. We grabbed some food and drink at the station, and another of the Slovaks helped us buy some tickets and put us on a train to Zilina. This train it turned out had a “party carriage”, where it seemed the proprietor of the restaurant car had had a few too many Friday afternoon drinks! We were informed that in Slovakia too, this was a rare sight.
Frankly, it’d be worth having a few of these party carriages on some of the soulless commuter services run by South West Trains. I digress.
We were driven to the Holiday Inn in Zilina, which thankfully (see later!) was actually only just round the corner. We soon met up with the rest of the UK delegation, which included UK puzzling superstar David McNeill (David, you get far too little recognition for your undoubted talents and I am going to do my best to champion you here!), two-time UK sudoku champion Nina Pell and Mike Colloby. These three made up the UK A-team, and together with non-participating Ariane Blok completed the UK contingent. The A team were being sponsored by Puzzler Media to go out, whereas us B-teamers were paying our own way. Nina and Mike had qualified via an online competition. David’s record at previous championships speaks for itself, regularly featuring in grand finals! It turned out that I was sharing a room with Mike. (Although as it happened I only had 13 and a half hours of sleep in that room over the 3 nights we were there!)
We had a couple of beers at the hotel bar, then discussed puzzler matters first as a team, and then with the Americans. They had only sent out one team this year, which looked as strong as ever – featuring Thomas Snyder, Wei-Hwa Huang and Jason Zuffranieri together with team captain Nick Baxter. I follow Thomas’ and Jason’s blogs fairly regularly, and all three of us are regular solvers at nikoli.com. Actually, all three of us have been puzzle champions at nikoli – the proof of which comes from the exclusive nikoli.com t-shirt, which I was weraing that evening. I particularly treasure my own as it not only shows that I have managed to beat Thomas, but also because I am less than likely to do so again. Anyhow it was good to put names to faces. Incidentally, that night I managed to identify (although didn’t have time to talk to) Hideako Jo as he had his nikoli t-shirt on as well. I suspect he doesn’t have to do much clothes shopping given the regularity with which he wins nikoli championships!
The rest of the evening was spent in a big conference room where tables had been laid out in preparation for a buffet style dinner, which was to be followed by some cheesy introductory presentation and the instructions. The tables were organised by countries, and joining us on our table was Times journalist Jack Malvern. I normally have a real dislike for any sort of journalist, but Jack is a genuinely top bloke, and as we were to find out later, the 4th best participant at the 2002 World Air Guitar Championships.
Anyhow, events this evening stretched out way beyond midnight – surprising given that solving was to begin at 9am the following morning, to start a monster day in which pens and pencils wouldn’t be put down until midnight. Much of the confusion lay in the instructions to the puzzles, some of which had been unclear before but after these instructions seemed to be no more enlightened. Perhaps a lot was lost in translation – most Slovak-English translations I’d seen up to that point didn’t really flow, I’m assuming there are some pretty major syntax differences between the two languages. Anyhow, what did become clear is that our host, Jan Farkas, was the spitting image of Borat. An omen of things to come, unfortunately…
The trip out to Zilina was pretty smooth. I set out from Coventry on Thursday afternoon, to meet up with Michael Collins, a fellow member of the UK “B”-team. His house is in London, and made for a convenient base to get to our 9.50am flight from Stansted to Bratislava. I was a little apprehensive of staying over with someone who I had only exchanged a few emails over, but ultimately both him and his wife were perfectly charming about my problem. In the morning, we drove to Stansted, and we were both a little confused as to why we hadn’t seen George Danker (the 3rd member of the UK B trio) and his girlfriend Sophie who was coming out to spectate. Nevertheless, just as Michael and I had taken our seats, George and Sophie entered the cabin, and we could reorder our priorities. Namely to get down to solving lots and lots of puzzles.
Once arrived in Bratislava, we met up with a chap called Stefan, a Slovakian participant who was there to help us with transfers. His English was pretty broken (although not as broken as my Slovakian!) but we got a bus from the airport to the railways station fairly easily – albeit if the route didn’t show us a particular picturesque view of the Slovakian capital. We grabbed some food and drink at the station, and another of the Slovaks helped us buy some tickets and put us on a train to Zilina. This train it turned out had a “party carriage”, where it seemed the proprietor of the restaurant car had had a few too many Friday afternoon drinks! We were informed that in Slovakia too, this was a rare sight.
Frankly, it’d be worth having a few of these party carriages on some of the soulless commuter services run by South West Trains. I digress.
We were driven to the Holiday Inn in Zilina, which thankfully (see later!) was actually only just round the corner. We soon met up with the rest of the UK delegation, which included UK puzzling superstar David McNeill (David, you get far too little recognition for your undoubted talents and I am going to do my best to champion you here!), two-time UK sudoku champion Nina Pell and Mike Colloby. These three made up the UK A-team, and together with non-participating Ariane Blok completed the UK contingent. The A team were being sponsored by Puzzler Media to go out, whereas us B-teamers were paying our own way. Nina and Mike had qualified via an online competition. David’s record at previous championships speaks for itself, regularly featuring in grand finals! It turned out that I was sharing a room with Mike. (Although as it happened I only had 13 and a half hours of sleep in that room over the 3 nights we were there!)
We had a couple of beers at the hotel bar, then discussed puzzler matters first as a team, and then with the Americans. They had only sent out one team this year, which looked as strong as ever – featuring Thomas Snyder, Wei-Hwa Huang and Jason Zuffranieri together with team captain Nick Baxter. I follow Thomas’ and Jason’s blogs fairly regularly, and all three of us are regular solvers at nikoli.com. Actually, all three of us have been puzzle champions at nikoli – the proof of which comes from the exclusive nikoli.com t-shirt, which I was weraing that evening. I particularly treasure my own as it not only shows that I have managed to beat Thomas, but also because I am less than likely to do so again. Anyhow it was good to put names to faces. Incidentally, that night I managed to identify (although didn’t have time to talk to) Hideako Jo as he had his nikoli t-shirt on as well. I suspect he doesn’t have to do much clothes shopping given the regularity with which he wins nikoli championships!
The rest of the evening was spent in a big conference room where tables had been laid out in preparation for a buffet style dinner, which was to be followed by some cheesy introductory presentation and the instructions. The tables were organised by countries, and joining us on our table was Times journalist Jack Malvern. I normally have a real dislike for any sort of journalist, but Jack is a genuinely top bloke, and as we were to find out later, the 4th best participant at the 2002 World Air Guitar Championships.
Anyhow, events this evening stretched out way beyond midnight – surprising given that solving was to begin at 9am the following morning, to start a monster day in which pens and pencils wouldn’t be put down until midnight. Much of the confusion lay in the instructions to the puzzles, some of which had been unclear before but after these instructions seemed to be no more enlightened. Perhaps a lot was lost in translation – most Slovak-English translations I’d seen up to that point didn’t really flow, I’m assuming there are some pretty major syntax differences between the two languages. Anyhow, what did become clear is that our host, Jan Farkas, was the spitting image of Borat. An omen of things to come, unfortunately…
Friday, 27 March 2009
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
A.K.A:
Tom Collyer does the Times Super Fiendish sudoku
(yes yes, I’m still keeping with my Radiohead song title for my titles.)
Ok lots of people at some point or another have been interested into how I do sudoku. In particular I am able to give a vague idea of what I do, but i seems to go over most people’s head. Possibly the most baffling thing about my solving technique is that (most of the time) I solve quickly without guessing – even on the harder puzzles.
Now I believe guessing on easier puzzles is stupid, and always slower, but on hard puzzles things get more interesting. At this point I’m going to assume those still reading know a little bit about sudoku and have come across advanced solving techniques – in particular the x-wing and the swordfish. There was a helpful page on The Times website but it seems to have gone. Oh well. Anyhow, most people think that these techniques are slow, clunky, require too much notation and are generally more bother than the time spent looking for them are worth. On the other hand the constructive logic (as opposed to contradictory associated with guessing) makes for a much more satisfying solve. And isn’t necessarily slow either!
Ok so the best way to illustrate this is through a quick walk-through. That means I’ll show some of my steps along the way but ideally you should go through it too. The puzzle in question is the Super-Fiendish published in The Times today (Friday 27th March 2009). It looks like this:
With most sudoku puzzles, there are always a few “gimme numbers” you can place without too much bother. Like this:
But then I come to a sticking point. Time to start looking for some weak subsets. What I mean by these are rows or columns or 3×3 boxes that are nearly filled out (i.e. have <5 numbers left to be filled in). There aren't very many boxes here, but the rows and columns look promoising. As it happens, I seem to naturally check columns before rows - and the ones that catch my eye here are 3, 4, 6 and 7. In particular, the gaps in 4 and 7 seem to line up very nicely. Sure enough, we spot the first x-wing with the 9's. Let's mark that in:
That doesn’t seem to give anything. So I continue on, scanning the rows in a similar fashion. Lo and behold I find another with the 8’s:
Well that’s all well and good, but they don’t obviously seem to be giving me any information. Clearly I’ve missed something…I’m very good at over looking obvious things, so I bet you can already see where! Ok a little bit further down the line things are looking more promising – in particular the x-wing with 8 wasn’t actually needed:
Now the x-wing with the 9’s comes into play. Observe it gives us the 9 in the bottom left box:
This essentially breaks the puzzle. I’m a little slow to finish it off from that point – but if you can complete a difficult level sudoku then there shouldn’t really be any problems finishing it off:
EDIT: Just noticed I’ve made a trademark transposition error (again!!!) in this image. The 6/7 in the middle box should be reversed!
The time I recorded there was just over 5 minutes. Actually I reckon with a bit more sharpness on my part (slow day obviously – the point at which the puzzle was effectively broken was just before 3 minutes and even then there was a bit of faffing around) I could knock a minute off that time. Swordfish are sometimes a little trickier to spot but the principles remain the same.
Anyhow, I captured the whole thing as a video if the pictures don’t tell you everything. You can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE4Iu5lwkyo
David M: I hope this highlights things a little better. Please let me know what you think!
Tom Collyer does the Times Super Fiendish sudoku
(yes yes, I’m still keeping with my Radiohead song title for my titles.)
Ok lots of people at some point or another have been interested into how I do sudoku. In particular I am able to give a vague idea of what I do, but i seems to go over most people’s head. Possibly the most baffling thing about my solving technique is that (most of the time) I solve quickly without guessing – even on the harder puzzles.
Now I believe guessing on easier puzzles is stupid, and always slower, but on hard puzzles things get more interesting. At this point I’m going to assume those still reading know a little bit about sudoku and have come across advanced solving techniques – in particular the x-wing and the swordfish. There was a helpful page on The Times website but it seems to have gone. Oh well. Anyhow, most people think that these techniques are slow, clunky, require too much notation and are generally more bother than the time spent looking for them are worth. On the other hand the constructive logic (as opposed to contradictory associated with guessing) makes for a much more satisfying solve. And isn’t necessarily slow either!
Ok so the best way to illustrate this is through a quick walk-through. That means I’ll show some of my steps along the way but ideally you should go through it too. The puzzle in question is the Super-Fiendish published in The Times today (Friday 27th March 2009). It looks like this:
With most sudoku puzzles, there are always a few “gimme numbers” you can place without too much bother. Like this:
But then I come to a sticking point. Time to start looking for some weak subsets. What I mean by these are rows or columns or 3×3 boxes that are nearly filled out (i.e. have <5 numbers left to be filled in). There aren't very many boxes here, but the rows and columns look promoising. As it happens, I seem to naturally check columns before rows - and the ones that catch my eye here are 3, 4, 6 and 7. In particular, the gaps in 4 and 7 seem to line up very nicely. Sure enough, we spot the first x-wing with the 9's. Let's mark that in:
That doesn’t seem to give anything. So I continue on, scanning the rows in a similar fashion. Lo and behold I find another with the 8’s:
Well that’s all well and good, but they don’t obviously seem to be giving me any information. Clearly I’ve missed something…I’m very good at over looking obvious things, so I bet you can already see where! Ok a little bit further down the line things are looking more promising – in particular the x-wing with 8 wasn’t actually needed:
Now the x-wing with the 9’s comes into play. Observe it gives us the 9 in the bottom left box:
This essentially breaks the puzzle. I’m a little slow to finish it off from that point – but if you can complete a difficult level sudoku then there shouldn’t really be any problems finishing it off:
EDIT: Just noticed I’ve made a trademark transposition error (again!!!) in this image. The 6/7 in the middle box should be reversed!
The time I recorded there was just over 5 minutes. Actually I reckon with a bit more sharpness on my part (slow day obviously – the point at which the puzzle was effectively broken was just before 3 minutes and even then there was a bit of faffing around) I could knock a minute off that time. Swordfish are sometimes a little trickier to spot but the principles remain the same.
Anyhow, I captured the whole thing as a video if the pictures don’t tell you everything. You can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE4Iu5lwkyo
David M: I hope this highlights things a little better. Please let me know what you think!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)