Hulver's site || Comments || A Day in the Life

Here I was, interested . . . by slozo (2.50 / 2) #4 Mon May 12, 2008 at 03:08:35 PM EST

. . . thinking that you had some novel, mathematical key to solving . . . but unfortunately I haven't seen any technique I haven't firgured out/used on my own. I'm a very (in my opinion) amateur Sudoku guy, and don't spend half the time on them as I do crosswords; the more difficult Sudokus I cannot finish at all.

Maybe it's because I get too bored with numbers then, who knows . . .

I'm not good enough by ReallyEvilCanine (4.00 / 1) #7 Tue May 13, 2008 at 11:33:03 AM EST

I think if there was some mathematical method which would place everything it would have been demonstrated by now. Making a sudoku isn't the same as the 8 queens placement; it's more "9 rooks of nine colours", exponentially more complex by rather many orders of magnitude. There are 92 possible solutions to the eight queens puzzle; there are more than 6.7e21 possible sudoku solutions; removing symmetry, rotation, reflection, etc. still leaves more than 5 billion possibilities, and that's just for the plain 9x9 version.

A sudoku puzzle must (by concensus) have a unique solution which doesn't have to be guessed at. Many people do employ guessing and back-tracking, and my strategies are attempts to do away with such inefficient nonsense. Guessing shouldn't be necessary in an exercise which itself is a demonstration of logic.

[ Parent ]

Mmm, yeah, I guess . . . by slozo (2.00 / 0) #8 Tue May 13, 2008 at 11:48:26 AM EST

. . . I was just surprised that I had all the tools, but that it was still really that difficult for me (the harder puzzles).

I'm glad that you didn't take my comment in the wrong way, because I certainly didn't mean to make a negative commentary on your sudoku knowledge - rather, I am just a little shocked that that was all there was to solving them. Shit, I can't say I would've had the patience to write that diary, that's for sure . . .

[ Parent ]

: Bragging Rights by ReallyEvilCanine (4.00 / 1) #9 Tue May 13, 2008 at 12:32:03 PM EST

I've come up with two original techniques. Yay me. These fuckers are a bitch to write not because I have to solve a bajillion puzzles to find really good examples, but because I then have to solve them each two or three times, make sure I'm not overlooking something which could've been found by a simpler, pre-existing technique (which happened the first time I tried to write up Group Cut), and only then create all the graphics. The write-up itself is easy and with FireFerret, so is uploading the GIFs.
That's really all there is to solving the damned puzzles: some logic, although with some of the really difficult puzzles like the weekly "mind-bending" Killer Sudoku they have at killersudokuonline.com, it's seriously contorted logic. I haven't solved one of those fuckers yet.

[ Parent ]