Sudoku Time
Posted by Stephen Waits Fri, 23 Dec 2005 04:59:00 GMT
I finished today’s puzzle in 6:12.
Meanwhile, I was messing around with some really difficult puzzles in Susser Sudoku, a great freeware (Mac, Windows, and Linux) sudoku solver; and, holy hell. Puzzles that I was certain required backtracking (i.e. “guessing”) don’t. You really can figure them out. It seems like you can solve most puzzles with naked pairs, hidden pairs, intersections, and pinned numbers - but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
On the USA Today puzzles I rarely need more than a single naked pair, and I never need to write out and track all of the possibilities. Easy.
Contrasting that are the puzzles in a book my sister-in-law got me called Second-Degree Black Belt Sudoku. I started a puzzle in this and quickly concluded that these weren’t “true” sudokus, but instead required guessing. Bottom line, I’m wrong. They’re just hard as hell. But that makes it fun!