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Knock, knock, knock. It was the loud noise of our captain's knock at the door that woke me and Wei-Hwa at 9:30 AM. Much later than I meant to be sleeping. Somehow, having taken so long to fall asleep that night, I was not woken up as the sun came out like I was the day before. We rushed our shower and our breakfast (no "Race" this time - maybe that was the problem) and then arrived at the main room for the playoff round. The playoffs were structured in what I felt was an unfortunately flat way. First, your results from the day before did not really mean much. Only in the event of a tie would the seed from the day before matter. Otherwise, everyone started out on even ground. 9 people would start the first puzzle and then after 15 minutes, your score would be the number of correct squares filled in minus the number of incorrect squares (to strongly discourage guessing). Provided you were not last after the 15 minutes, you stayed in the playoffs. Results from one puzzle did not carry over to the next. You just started over again, this time with 8 and then with 7 and then with 6, ... until the final puzzle where 3 solvers would look at a single classic sudoku and the first to finish it (or get the farthest in 15 minutes) would be crowned champion. With this format, my hope was that I could make the top three and that my teammate Wei-Hwa would be able to as well, and then whatever happened in that final puzzle would happen. Given how we had finished the day before (Wei-Hwa and I about 100 points above the next top finisher, Zoltan Horvath from Hungary, and then another 125 points above the next highest finisher), it seemed only right for the top solvers to advance in this "crapshoot" of a playoff structure.
Anyway, getting to that first puzzle, I was still somewhat asleep and was also about to be made aware of the pressure of solving puzzles under the watchful eye of 10-20 photographers' cameras. We each were given yellow bibs with the number 1-9 on them and so, as the day started, I was the prime target in the middle of the room (the solvers were arranged in an alternating fashion 8-6-4-2-1-3-5-7-9 from left to right) and an obvious subject for the press. Wei-Hwa, my teammate, also got attention, as did Jana Tylova, the eighth seed, and lone woman remaining in the competition. The puzzles were set up on easels and, unfortunately, during that first puzzle, photographers got courageous and even took up locations behind and to the sides of the easels to shoot pictures directly in my face as I was solving. Not that many of them used flash - none of them needed to - but the cameras and constant shutter noises were bothersome. I almost wished this much attention was given to the actual newsworthy events of the day, as it seemed the care taken to record every single number I ever wrote on a puzzle, if applied to something more important, might lead to real change in the state of the world at this moment.
The first playoff round was an extra-regions puzzle, not one I was too confident of given it being the hardest for me in round 2 the day before. The regions on this one actually spelled out WSC but I didn't have time to fully process this until the round was over. I started slow, did not see the "in" that I was meant to (the large printed puzzle also seemed to work against me as I needed to move my head more to scan for numbers than I do when the puzzle is printed on a sheet of paper in front of me) but eventually recovered and made enough progress as time ended to finish 6th in the round and move on. Three people tied with just 13 squares, and Nikola Zivanovic was eliminated in 9th position.
I had hoped to regain my form in the second playoff round, an Outside Sudoku, but somehow still was not completely used to solving in front of people, solving on a big grid, or at least was not fully awake, and finished 6th again on this puzzle. The 8th place person, Robert Babilon (former WPC champion) was eliminated 8th.
I tried to regroup. I went into the press room and stole some of their water ("no gas", thank goodness) and focused on remembering the rules to the next puzzle. It was a very ingenious design for a puzzle, and a good puzzle, but perhaps too complicated for its own good and certainly too complicated for a playoff round with the stress that comes along with it. It was a "Combined Sudoku" with 9 different regions that had 9 different rules to use. There was a digital region, an even/odd, a consecutive, a sum sudoku region, a classic sudoku region, a pips region, a big/small region, a greater than/less than region, and finally a pandigital region. Lots of rules to remember and work through. I think I missed the instruction as it was given but the digital was a little different than the one earlier in the competition and I had to figure out how to interpret it correctly.
The puzzle was fun, I thought I regained my earlier form from the day before, but I was still making errors in the stress of the situation. I saw the way in was to use the pips to force information all the way on the left in the sum region which forces things both above and below in the digital and big/small regions. The digital region then puts a nice set of constraints on the consecutive region in the upper-right which triggers a forced 2 in the middle that feeds into the odd/even in the upper middle. You then had enough to start to work downwards through the pips and the classic, then feed the pandigital in the lower right. This is where I finally made my error (but late enough that I finished the round 2nd). I saw 2+5=7 was forced and wrote 257, but of course only the sum of 7 is forced in its placement, the 2 and 5 are not yet required to go anywhere. I spent my last five minutes trying to find my error and check my work to ensure I would continue and so I did not finish. Anyway, an impressive but impressively confusing puzzle. I had 56 cells filled, good for 2nd overall and Shinichi Aoki, 4th place overall, actually finished the puzzle to win the round (again, winning rounds meant nothing). Peter Hudak had just 10 cells filled and was eliminated in 7th.
We were now getting into the down and dirty. The next puzzle was the one I figured would be my first statement to the field that I was back and loaded for bear. It was a cubic sudoku which I've gotten very fast at, using the forced 2x2 corner rules to do placements much quicker. As we started, I went boom-boom-boom through the puzzle and finished it in 3 minutes. I did two sets of checks (no use making an error and getting eliminated) and declared I was finished in 4 minutes, the first to so declare. Wei-Hwa, my teammate, who had been doing well so far during the playoffs, finished and declared a minute later. Within another 5 minutes, all but the two Japanese masters had finished and it came down to whether Tetsuya Nishio or Shinichi Aoki would finish first. Tetsuya finished less than a minute before Shinichi and so, while everyone completed the puzzle in time, Shinichi was eliminated in 6th.
The fifth playoff puzzle was an irregular, my favorite type. When I first saw the puzzle, I recognized both the shapes and placements from the day before, but figured the organizers were being cute and had switched the identities of the numbers. I checked the way I worked into it the day before (something like the rows/columns that had just 3 digits) but did not see the same work-in I did the day before, so I solved it a whole new way. It turns out it was a repeated puzzle from the irregular round (the 9x9 for 50 points) but none of the 5 remaining solvers realized this or at least did not use this information. I solved the puzzle in my second, distinct route very efficiently, in about 7 minutes, and then checked the regions twice and declared at 8 minutes in. I sat down and had photo after photo of me in my contemplative pose taken as I waited and waited for the next finisher. Wei-Hwa would finally finish and declare at 11-11.5 minutes and Tetsuya declared a couple minutes after that. I stood up and looked at Zoltan's puzzle in the last minute as time was running down to see if he would finish (he was in 3rd, and at that time still next to me as the order was 8-2-1-3-9 at that point). In the last minute I saw him correctly fill in the 2/3/7 in the lower right piece, and then for some reason erase these three digits and put them in completely wrong in the last couple seconds. Without that erasure, Zoltan would have advanced. He and Jana both struggled with this puzzle (getting 21 and 25 points respectively), but the 6 point swing I saw on Zoltan's grid in the last minute from 3 correct numbers to 3 incorrect sealed his fate and Zoltan, who dominated the irregular round the day before, was eliminated on it in the playoffs.
After another trip to the press room to "steal" some "no gas" water, I was ready to tackle the next challenge. 4 puzzlers left. Jana Tylova, who was hanging tough as the last woman in the competition, Tetsuya Nishio, the Japanese puzzle writer who introduced Sudoku (when it was still called Number Place) to Japan, and has been solving and writing these puzzles for decades, Wei-Hwa Huang, and myself. The second to last puzzle was a toroidal. I posted this puzzle last week on this site. Going in, we had seen one prior example from Michael Rios on the USPC in 2005. That puzzle had an interesting result in that the same set of 3 numbers would always repeat as triplets in the puzzle. We hypothesized that this may be necessary in a toroidal puzzle, but thought we would solve enough of the puzzle before we used this rule. As it turned out, the rule still held on this puzzle and made my last 4 minutes when I could finally start filling in the grid much faster. Anyway, as I started this puzzle, I sort of freaked out as there was only one simple number to place and then it was really tough to see anything. I could hear the others writing (I tended to write many fewer notes on the grid I think than my competitors) but I could not see where they were getting with the puzzle obviously. I had blocked out the camera shutters by now (they did come back in the final puzzle, however) but I'm sure they were enjoying the drama of the moment as well. Anyway, I started to see some toroidal constraints that would let me place a digit. In particular (feel free to refer to my earlier post of this puzzle), I saw that the 9's at R3C6 and R6C9 would be important (sitting as they do at the critical juncture points on the right side of their respective pieces). At this point, you can put a 9 at either R4C7 or R7C5, and if you look at what happens if you put a 9 at R4C7 - it forces a whole diagonal to be 9's, but this is impossible - I could place a 9 at R7C5 and get started. I then saw a singleton at R2C5 and then another singleton at R6C5, and then I was sort of off to the races. I finally finished the puzzle, just before the end of time, at about 14 minutes. I could tell something was up as one of the organizers was starting to loom behind me as I was placing my last digits, waiting for me to finish. I thought maybe others were close to finishing too and the timing would be tight. I finished, declared (this time without checking), and then, as Wayne Gould would later comment on sudoku.com, "crumpled" from the weight of solving the puzzle. I turned around, pulled my hair back, breathed deeply, and as I turned around and saw the 81 written on top of my grid, I did a little fist pump, excited to have solved this one. I then looked over at Wei-Hwa's grid and saw one number in marker, nothing else filled in. I got real worried and thought he'd be eliminated. I then saw Tetsuya's grid and saw he also had just one number. Jana's grid had just one number too. Somehow, no one else could get into this puzzle, and I alone made any progress. In the end, the tiebreaker eliminated Tetsuya from the field, but it was disappointing to me to have such an impressive round and have it really mean nothing.
So, it was down to three. It took way too long to get this final puzzle started. I think it was a whole hour almost between the second last and last puzzle (we were already running late) and the time killed the buzz I sort of had going over the last 3 playoff puzzles where I finally regained my solving form. There was a break for some photos, some reporter's questions, some television interviews. I stole some more "no gas" water, twice actually, and then finally the classic puzzle arrived. It turned out the original puzzle had some errors, so a new puzzle had been substituted. The posters we were given therefore had some pasted on "blanks" and some pasted on numbers that were sort of distracting as it was not the original grid. I made decent progress and got to the logical sticking point and made my decision to continue working by logic. I got a couple more numbers placed, but was by then close enough to the end that I started to enter in some deterministic guesses (I dislike doing this, but in a time round, its probably the best way to be fastest). I actually started with the correct guess and got halfway done propagating it when I heard Wei-Hwa say finished. He had actually started a guess path and only caught it was wrong with ~4 squares left, so he didn't bother to fix it and just wanted to declare a time for his score. Anyway, this seemed to have rattled me, as it occurred about when I misplaced a digit in the path I was following in the lower left box. If I hadn't made this error, I would have continued on and possibly won. However, when you see an error in a puzzle after starting a branch point, you normally assume its the contradiction. So I then started down the other path, reached a contradiction in it, and by then was stuck trying to minimize my lost points in the last 30 seconds as Jana finished. She had also, I believe, followed a guessing path after the logical sticking point, and so all three of us on stage had used a non-logical route to finish this puzzle. This seems so completely unsatisfying, particularly after how the penultimate puzzle prohibited guessing and clearly separated me from the other three competitors. The last puzzle was certainly one of the worst solves I've done of a classic in recent memory. I painfully made myself redo it on a small grid on paper and could do it much faster and saw the logical step I couldn't on the big grid. I think I'll practice on a whiteboard in large size before next year's tournaments just to get some more practice training my eyes to unfocus and see big digits from close up. Eagle-eye is a bad thing when solving in this context I believe. Anyway, with all of Wei-Hwa's errors, his score dropped below mine (even though I still had the errors of the wrong guess path) and so Jana was 1st, I finished 2nd, and Wei-Hwa finished 3rd in the final results.
Gathering my stuff, I had a quick talk with Wayne Gould (the man who introduced Sudoku to England in a way) who congratulated me for my performance, talked to my teammates (many of whom were heading out), and then we traveled back to Lucca for the awards ceremony. Wei-Hwa and I snuck in a game of "Race" before the awards were given out. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the prizes. We each received a week's stay (hotel and meals) in Lucca, a wood SuDoKuBo set (a peg set to use when solving puzzles) that had our places engraved on it, a nice plaque, and, best of all, a PSP and a copy of the game Go!Sudoku that was being marketed at the WSC event. Having now gotten the PSP home to use (I had to get a US power cable to finally try it out as it came with European plugs), the Go!Sudoku game is a reasonable way to play sudoku. It definitely beats some of the other handheld sudoku machines I've seen out there. We all got to say thanks to the organizers and then, just like that, the event was done. Nick had wanted to see the leaning tower of Pisa (doesn't make much sense to fly into Pisa and then not see the one-hit wonder city's one-hit wonder) so we all took a train to Pisa and ran into some of our team there again. After going all day since breakfast without any food, Wei-Hwa and I both got a big 4 scoop gelato cone - sweet, sweet ice cream. We saw the tower just before sunset and also stopped in a large Italian toy store and saw all the board games I'm used to in a foreign language. My favorite was the new version of Risk themed around S.P.Q.R. - makes sense to me when in Italy.
After eating back in Lucca, we "raced" some more, and then prepared to leave the next day. The shuttles back to the airport were nowhere nearly as well organized as the one's to the hotel on the first day. I eventually had to arrange my own taxi to the airport. The driver charged me a tourist rate and drove a tourist route through Pisa and by the tower, even though I just wanted to go to the airport. Ridiculous. I begrugingly paid the fee.
I had the most unusual puzzle experience while at the airport. I was doing a Slitherlink puzzle (time rated to 17 minutes for expert/top-time) and got started on it in the waiting area. Suddenly, I started to hear all these shutters in my head. I got convinced people were still taking photos of me as they were the day before. I got very nervous, looked around a lot, but kept working on the puzzle. This continued for awhile, and was very very disconcerting. Write some lines in the grid, hear shutter, shutter, shutter. Write some more lines, hear some more shutters.... It turns out the sound of a newspaper being opened sounds a lot like a camera shutter when you are trying to solve a puzzle. Here I was solving a slitherlink in an airport terminal where many people were reading their newspapers and all I was hearing was camera after camera behind me even though no one was shooting any pictures. It was the worst puzzling experience I've ever had. I finished the slitherlink in 18.5 minutes, slower than I should have been able to, but given the circumstances, probably good enough. I don't think I could do another puzzle the whole flight home until I was sure I wasn't being watched. I have yet to crack open that Slitherlink book again, but I'll be sure to have some music on in an otherwise quiet place to be sure that I don't have another panic attack of papparazzi puzzling.
The first flight to Paris was slightly delayed arriving which made the connection in Charles de Gaulle airport more difficult than I like (we got a special bus, then got led on a quick 1 km "walk" through the terminal) and then, on the flight itself, I got stuck in the one seat whose tv monitor was not working. So no movies for the whole 7 hour flight. Sort of a bad end to the trip, but I finally got home, finally caught up on sleep, and made it through a whole week without doing a Sudoku. I don't know if this is a good thing, but somehow it seems worth mentioning, given how I was doing nearly a hundred a day in the two weeks before the event.
Until the next WSC (which may or may not be in Lucca) - or at least until the next WPC - I bid my international puzzling friends goodbye. I will try my best on this year's USPC to qualify for the WPC in Sophia, Bulgaria, but if I cannot make that, I will certainly be back at next year's World Sudoku Championships, hopefully with more experience for solving on big paper in front of an audience. Thanks to all those who wrote the puzzles used at the WSC, thanks to all the organizers for pulling off a reasonably clean event, thanks to my US teammates and guests, particularly Will Shortz, Wei-Hwa, and our team captain Nick Baxter for all of his assistance both before and during the event. Ciao.
Anyway, getting to that first puzzle, I was still somewhat asleep and was also about to be made aware of the pressure of solving puzzles under the watchful eye of 10-20 photographers' cameras. We each were given yellow bibs with the number 1-9 on them and so, as the day started, I was the prime target in the middle of the room (the solvers were arranged in an alternating fashion 8-6-4-2-1-3-5-7-9 from left to right) and an obvious subject for the press. Wei-Hwa, my teammate, also got attention, as did Jana Tylova, the eighth seed, and lone woman remaining in the competition. The puzzles were set up on easels and, unfortunately, during that first puzzle, photographers got courageous and even took up locations behind and to the sides of the easels to shoot pictures directly in my face as I was solving. Not that many of them used flash - none of them needed to - but the cameras and constant shutter noises were bothersome. I almost wished this much attention was given to the actual newsworthy events of the day, as it seemed the care taken to record every single number I ever wrote on a puzzle, if applied to something more important, might lead to real change in the state of the world at this moment.
The first playoff round was an extra-regions puzzle, not one I was too confident of given it being the hardest for me in round 2 the day before. The regions on this one actually spelled out WSC but I didn't have time to fully process this until the round was over. I started slow, did not see the "in" that I was meant to (the large printed puzzle also seemed to work against me as I needed to move my head more to scan for numbers than I do when the puzzle is printed on a sheet of paper in front of me) but eventually recovered and made enough progress as time ended to finish 6th in the round and move on. Three people tied with just 13 squares, and Nikola Zivanovic was eliminated in 9th position.
I had hoped to regain my form in the second playoff round, an Outside Sudoku, but somehow still was not completely used to solving in front of people, solving on a big grid, or at least was not fully awake, and finished 6th again on this puzzle. The 8th place person, Robert Babilon (former WPC champion) was eliminated 8th.
I tried to regroup. I went into the press room and stole some of their water ("no gas", thank goodness) and focused on remembering the rules to the next puzzle. It was a very ingenious design for a puzzle, and a good puzzle, but perhaps too complicated for its own good and certainly too complicated for a playoff round with the stress that comes along with it. It was a "Combined Sudoku" with 9 different regions that had 9 different rules to use. There was a digital region, an even/odd, a consecutive, a sum sudoku region, a classic sudoku region, a pips region, a big/small region, a greater than/less than region, and finally a pandigital region. Lots of rules to remember and work through. I think I missed the instruction as it was given but the digital was a little different than the one earlier in the competition and I had to figure out how to interpret it correctly.
The puzzle was fun, I thought I regained my earlier form from the day before, but I was still making errors in the stress of the situation. I saw the way in was to use the pips to force information all the way on the left in the sum region which forces things both above and below in the digital and big/small regions. The digital region then puts a nice set of constraints on the consecutive region in the upper-right which triggers a forced 2 in the middle that feeds into the odd/even in the upper middle. You then had enough to start to work downwards through the pips and the classic, then feed the pandigital in the lower right. This is where I finally made my error (but late enough that I finished the round 2nd). I saw 2+5=7 was forced and wrote 257, but of course only the sum of 7 is forced in its placement, the 2 and 5 are not yet required to go anywhere. I spent my last five minutes trying to find my error and check my work to ensure I would continue and so I did not finish. Anyway, an impressive but impressively confusing puzzle. I had 56 cells filled, good for 2nd overall and Shinichi Aoki, 4th place overall, actually finished the puzzle to win the round (again, winning rounds meant nothing). Peter Hudak had just 10 cells filled and was eliminated in 7th.
We were now getting into the down and dirty. The next puzzle was the one I figured would be my first statement to the field that I was back and loaded for bear. It was a cubic sudoku which I've gotten very fast at, using the forced 2x2 corner rules to do placements much quicker. As we started, I went boom-boom-boom through the puzzle and finished it in 3 minutes. I did two sets of checks (no use making an error and getting eliminated) and declared I was finished in 4 minutes, the first to so declare. Wei-Hwa, my teammate, who had been doing well so far during the playoffs, finished and declared a minute later. Within another 5 minutes, all but the two Japanese masters had finished and it came down to whether Tetsuya Nishio or Shinichi Aoki would finish first. Tetsuya finished less than a minute before Shinichi and so, while everyone completed the puzzle in time, Shinichi was eliminated in 6th.
The fifth playoff puzzle was an irregular, my favorite type. When I first saw the puzzle, I recognized both the shapes and placements from the day before, but figured the organizers were being cute and had switched the identities of the numbers. I checked the way I worked into it the day before (something like the rows/columns that had just 3 digits) but did not see the same work-in I did the day before, so I solved it a whole new way. It turns out it was a repeated puzzle from the irregular round (the 9x9 for 50 points) but none of the 5 remaining solvers realized this or at least did not use this information. I solved the puzzle in my second, distinct route very efficiently, in about 7 minutes, and then checked the regions twice and declared at 8 minutes in. I sat down and had photo after photo of me in my contemplative pose taken as I waited and waited for the next finisher. Wei-Hwa would finally finish and declare at 11-11.5 minutes and Tetsuya declared a couple minutes after that. I stood up and looked at Zoltan's puzzle in the last minute as time was running down to see if he would finish (he was in 3rd, and at that time still next to me as the order was 8-2-1-3-9 at that point). In the last minute I saw him correctly fill in the 2/3/7 in the lower right piece, and then for some reason erase these three digits and put them in completely wrong in the last couple seconds. Without that erasure, Zoltan would have advanced. He and Jana both struggled with this puzzle (getting 21 and 25 points respectively), but the 6 point swing I saw on Zoltan's grid in the last minute from 3 correct numbers to 3 incorrect sealed his fate and Zoltan, who dominated the irregular round the day before, was eliminated on it in the playoffs.
After another trip to the press room to "steal" some "no gas" water, I was ready to tackle the next challenge. 4 puzzlers left. Jana Tylova, who was hanging tough as the last woman in the competition, Tetsuya Nishio, the Japanese puzzle writer who introduced Sudoku (when it was still called Number Place) to Japan, and has been solving and writing these puzzles for decades, Wei-Hwa Huang, and myself. The second to last puzzle was a toroidal. I posted this puzzle last week on this site. Going in, we had seen one prior example from Michael Rios on the USPC in 2005. That puzzle had an interesting result in that the same set of 3 numbers would always repeat as triplets in the puzzle. We hypothesized that this may be necessary in a toroidal puzzle, but thought we would solve enough of the puzzle before we used this rule. As it turned out, the rule still held on this puzzle and made my last 4 minutes when I could finally start filling in the grid much faster. Anyway, as I started this puzzle, I sort of freaked out as there was only one simple number to place and then it was really tough to see anything. I could hear the others writing (I tended to write many fewer notes on the grid I think than my competitors) but I could not see where they were getting with the puzzle obviously. I had blocked out the camera shutters by now (they did come back in the final puzzle, however) but I'm sure they were enjoying the drama of the moment as well. Anyway, I started to see some toroidal constraints that would let me place a digit. In particular (feel free to refer to my earlier post of this puzzle), I saw that the 9's at R3C6 and R6C9 would be important (sitting as they do at the critical juncture points on the right side of their respective pieces). At this point, you can put a 9 at either R4C7 or R7C5, and if you look at what happens if you put a 9 at R4C7 - it forces a whole diagonal to be 9's, but this is impossible - I could place a 9 at R7C5 and get started. I then saw a singleton at R2C5 and then another singleton at R6C5, and then I was sort of off to the races. I finally finished the puzzle, just before the end of time, at about 14 minutes. I could tell something was up as one of the organizers was starting to loom behind me as I was placing my last digits, waiting for me to finish. I thought maybe others were close to finishing too and the timing would be tight. I finished, declared (this time without checking), and then, as Wayne Gould would later comment on sudoku.com, "crumpled" from the weight of solving the puzzle. I turned around, pulled my hair back, breathed deeply, and as I turned around and saw the 81 written on top of my grid, I did a little fist pump, excited to have solved this one. I then looked over at Wei-Hwa's grid and saw one number in marker, nothing else filled in. I got real worried and thought he'd be eliminated. I then saw Tetsuya's grid and saw he also had just one number. Jana's grid had just one number too. Somehow, no one else could get into this puzzle, and I alone made any progress. In the end, the tiebreaker eliminated Tetsuya from the field, but it was disappointing to me to have such an impressive round and have it really mean nothing.
So, it was down to three. It took way too long to get this final puzzle started. I think it was a whole hour almost between the second last and last puzzle (we were already running late) and the time killed the buzz I sort of had going over the last 3 playoff puzzles where I finally regained my solving form. There was a break for some photos, some reporter's questions, some television interviews. I stole some more "no gas" water, twice actually, and then finally the classic puzzle arrived. It turned out the original puzzle had some errors, so a new puzzle had been substituted. The posters we were given therefore had some pasted on "blanks" and some pasted on numbers that were sort of distracting as it was not the original grid. I made decent progress and got to the logical sticking point and made my decision to continue working by logic. I got a couple more numbers placed, but was by then close enough to the end that I started to enter in some deterministic guesses (I dislike doing this, but in a time round, its probably the best way to be fastest). I actually started with the correct guess and got halfway done propagating it when I heard Wei-Hwa say finished. He had actually started a guess path and only caught it was wrong with ~4 squares left, so he didn't bother to fix it and just wanted to declare a time for his score. Anyway, this seemed to have rattled me, as it occurred about when I misplaced a digit in the path I was following in the lower left box. If I hadn't made this error, I would have continued on and possibly won. However, when you see an error in a puzzle after starting a branch point, you normally assume its the contradiction. So I then started down the other path, reached a contradiction in it, and by then was stuck trying to minimize my lost points in the last 30 seconds as Jana finished. She had also, I believe, followed a guessing path after the logical sticking point, and so all three of us on stage had used a non-logical route to finish this puzzle. This seems so completely unsatisfying, particularly after how the penultimate puzzle prohibited guessing and clearly separated me from the other three competitors. The last puzzle was certainly one of the worst solves I've done of a classic in recent memory. I painfully made myself redo it on a small grid on paper and could do it much faster and saw the logical step I couldn't on the big grid. I think I'll practice on a whiteboard in large size before next year's tournaments just to get some more practice training my eyes to unfocus and see big digits from close up. Eagle-eye is a bad thing when solving in this context I believe. Anyway, with all of Wei-Hwa's errors, his score dropped below mine (even though I still had the errors of the wrong guess path) and so Jana was 1st, I finished 2nd, and Wei-Hwa finished 3rd in the final results.
Gathering my stuff, I had a quick talk with Wayne Gould (the man who introduced Sudoku to England in a way) who congratulated me for my performance, talked to my teammates (many of whom were heading out), and then we traveled back to Lucca for the awards ceremony. Wei-Hwa and I snuck in a game of "Race" before the awards were given out. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the prizes. We each received a week's stay (hotel and meals) in Lucca, a wood SuDoKuBo set (a peg set to use when solving puzzles) that had our places engraved on it, a nice plaque, and, best of all, a PSP and a copy of the game Go!Sudoku that was being marketed at the WSC event. Having now gotten the PSP home to use (I had to get a US power cable to finally try it out as it came with European plugs), the Go!Sudoku game is a reasonable way to play sudoku. It definitely beats some of the other handheld sudoku machines I've seen out there. We all got to say thanks to the organizers and then, just like that, the event was done. Nick had wanted to see the leaning tower of Pisa (doesn't make much sense to fly into Pisa and then not see the one-hit wonder city's one-hit wonder) so we all took a train to Pisa and ran into some of our team there again. After going all day since breakfast without any food, Wei-Hwa and I both got a big 4 scoop gelato cone - sweet, sweet ice cream. We saw the tower just before sunset and also stopped in a large Italian toy store and saw all the board games I'm used to in a foreign language. My favorite was the new version of Risk themed around S.P.Q.R. - makes sense to me when in Italy.
After eating back in Lucca, we "raced" some more, and then prepared to leave the next day. The shuttles back to the airport were nowhere nearly as well organized as the one's to the hotel on the first day. I eventually had to arrange my own taxi to the airport. The driver charged me a tourist rate and drove a tourist route through Pisa and by the tower, even though I just wanted to go to the airport. Ridiculous. I begrugingly paid the fee.
I had the most unusual puzzle experience while at the airport. I was doing a Slitherlink puzzle (time rated to 17 minutes for expert/top-time) and got started on it in the waiting area. Suddenly, I started to hear all these shutters in my head. I got convinced people were still taking photos of me as they were the day before. I got very nervous, looked around a lot, but kept working on the puzzle. This continued for awhile, and was very very disconcerting. Write some lines in the grid, hear shutter, shutter, shutter. Write some more lines, hear some more shutters.... It turns out the sound of a newspaper being opened sounds a lot like a camera shutter when you are trying to solve a puzzle. Here I was solving a slitherlink in an airport terminal where many people were reading their newspapers and all I was hearing was camera after camera behind me even though no one was shooting any pictures. It was the worst puzzling experience I've ever had. I finished the slitherlink in 18.5 minutes, slower than I should have been able to, but given the circumstances, probably good enough. I don't think I could do another puzzle the whole flight home until I was sure I wasn't being watched. I have yet to crack open that Slitherlink book again, but I'll be sure to have some music on in an otherwise quiet place to be sure that I don't have another panic attack of papparazzi puzzling.
The first flight to Paris was slightly delayed arriving which made the connection in Charles de Gaulle airport more difficult than I like (we got a special bus, then got led on a quick 1 km "walk" through the terminal) and then, on the flight itself, I got stuck in the one seat whose tv monitor was not working. So no movies for the whole 7 hour flight. Sort of a bad end to the trip, but I finally got home, finally caught up on sleep, and made it through a whole week without doing a Sudoku. I don't know if this is a good thing, but somehow it seems worth mentioning, given how I was doing nearly a hundred a day in the two weeks before the event.
Until the next WSC (which may or may not be in Lucca) - or at least until the next WPC - I bid my international puzzling friends goodbye. I will try my best on this year's USPC to qualify for the WPC in Sophia, Bulgaria, but if I cannot make that, I will certainly be back at next year's World Sudoku Championships, hopefully with more experience for solving on big paper in front of an audience. Thanks to all those who wrote the puzzles used at the WSC, thanks to all the organizers for pulling off a reasonably clean event, thanks to my US teammates and guests, particularly Will Shortz, Wei-Hwa, and our team captain Nick Baxter for all of his assistance both before and during the event. Ciao.
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