Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2022 March 16

= March 16 =

World Sudoku Championship puzzles
Have any standard Sudoku puzzles been made public that were used for a World Sudoku Championship competition? And is it known how the participant scores are determined? Also, have puzzles been published that were used for the "World Record" round, in which solvers compete to set a Guinness World Record for fastest Sudoku solution? To compare the speed of solvers, one needs puzzles of equal difficulty. I can construct puzzles that anyone who knows the rules can solve within one second. --Lambiam 21:00, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
 * They are for sale here: complete set of WSC data for one year, price 20 EUR. Each championship has its own website (page with links to individual WSC sites for different years), and it seems each website has a "downloads" page which has a pdf booklet explaining rules and scoring. (Might be better to try the 2018 Czech Republic site rather than the 2019 Germany site, as the 2019 booklet crashed my browser, and is possibly a malformed file.)  Card Zero  (talk) 22:47, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I could download and view the 2019 booklet without problems. I see a heavy emphasis on variations; of the maximum of 4300 points an individual player could theoretically win, only 490 points or 11.4% were for Classic Sudoku puzzles. (The 2019 winner was Ken Endo from Japan with 3805 points.) Points were for puzzles solved within a fixed time limit, unlike for other competitions, like Rubik's cube, where the winner is determined by the time needed to solve a puzzle. --Lambiam 09:46, 17 March 2022 (UTC)