I've given up on Sudoku. I used to be quite good at the medium/hard ones, but seem to have lost the touch, and have got bored.
It sometimes occurred to me to wonder what the difference was between solving a very difficult Sudoku and composing one.
If you simply presented a blank Sudoku page and billed it as the world's most difficult sudoku, it obviously would be solvable, because someone could simply compose one to fit.
Then as you complete more numbers it would still be difficult, but only as difficult as creating one from scratch.
But at some point, "creation" would give way to "solution".
How is the cross-over point defined? Is there a definition that a valid sudoku has to have only one solution? How do composers prove that there aren't any other solutions other than their correct one?
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AFAIK it's composing them which is the tricky bit, and where the inventor makes his money. It's not too difficult to write a program to solve them - I've done it myself.
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I remember trying my first Sudoku and getting it wrong.
(This was in the days when the Telegraph's Sudokus used to have points where it appeared there were two different solutions, and you had to try both until it was obvious that one was not working.)
And the second and getting it right. At that point I could do them so haven't bothered trying since. Utterly boring way of spending time.
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Anyone with Google's Goggles app on their phone can solve that puzzle in seconds. Well Google does it for you :-)
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I find sudoko reasonably entertaining, and is my morning toilet activity. (men have to do things while having a dump, read, surf etc) Its the sheer inconsistency of them I find annoying. The Times for example, their fiendish one is sometimes challenging and sometimes ludicrously easy.
Its not skill or brains required, but method. I will print that one out when I have print facilities and try it.
Last edited by: Zero on Wed 4 Jul 12 at 11:45
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Some days I used to do all 6 in the Mail, plus the mini ones. I stopped when me peepers went bad and haven't re-started apart from occasionally in the clinic waiting room or to fill a few minutes.
The one I do enjoy is the Mail on Sunday's 12 number version.....make a mistake without noticing and you might as well give up. I don't do that one very often now either.
I used to do the cryptic crossword of whatever daily I was getting but I found I was wasting my day...even coming back to it at bedtime if I'd still got a couple of words missing.
Lifes too short !
Ted
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I used to have a Sudoku puzzle on my old Nokia work phone, and it was quite fun. It only generated (relatively) easy puzzles which you could solve without pen & paper, so the aim was to beat the clock. Can't be bothered with the 'proper' ones.
I do (very) occasionally enjoy doing the Sunday Telegraph's 'Griddler' (nonogram?) puzzle, which involves filling in squares in a grid. At least you're left with a pretty picture at the end of it, if you do it right.
www.griddler.co.uk/FreeNonograms.aspx (not a great picture)
EDIT: in the paper, not online - the above just gives an idea of what one is
Last edited by: Focus on Wed 4 Jul 12 at 13:02
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I never really got these sorts of puzzles, possibly because i'm terrible at them, I've tried a couple of the easy ones once and it was safe to say I didn't have the foggiest about how to do it and didn't even come close to finish it. The same for me for any similar sort of puzzle, I don't think I've completed even one crossword in my life.
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When I was working in London, Sudoku was what got me through the 35 minute daily Tube journey. I agree with Zero though, the difficulty levels are very inconsistent. Sometimes I could do a 'Fiendish' in 10 minutes, and other times I'd have barely entered half a dozen numbers by the time my journey came to an end. Good fun though.
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Sudoku - the nightmare - Cliff Pope
