Anyone good at sudoku here?

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kuchitsu
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Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by kuchitsu »

I just want to ask about this site: https://www.websudoku.com/

I've been solving here for a while. I always succeed at easy and medium puzzles and usually succeed at hard ones when I have the patience to analyze everything carefully, but I'm completely stumped by all evil puzzles. I enter like 10-15 numbers at best and then I don't see anything definite at all. Would you say the evil difficulty is a lot harder than the other? Does it require some advanced techniques I haven't invented yet?
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pawq
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by pawq »

Too annoying web UI, gave up after a while, but doesn't look too hard. Been quite a bit of sudoku talk on discord lately, several pages below this line in #other-games:
[17:42] pskrip: coded sudoku solver, but can't understand solving logic in this example :slight_smile:
Following finman's recommendation, I highly recommend teh Sudoku mobile app by Brainium. It has a great UI and tips that help you learn more advanced gakkery :beers:

I hoyled 3:16 there on Hard, Extreme a bit too annoying/hard without advanced techniques :)
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by knock »

It's about thinking ahead, ruling out what can't go where which normally leaves few options in certain squares. I do sudokus all the time and i finished the evil one in about 15 min, once you get the way of thinking it becomes alot easier.

I do agree with the UI being pretty crap on that site, gonna give that Brainium one a go. Been using the Genina one myself.
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by SveinR »

Haven't tried the other difficulties but tried an Evil one now and solved it (although it was annoying me quite a bit and took some time :P).

I suppose difference might be having to spot "combinations" more, like you may have 3 numbers that all can go to three spots but due to other info you know that two of them have to occupy spot 1 and 3 for instance. So hence the final number has to go in the middle of these, even though you don't know which of the other numbers go to which square yet.
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by Grace »

I find Sudoku quite enjoyable and used to race solving them against my father many years ago, got quite good at them.

Evil difficulty ones start out that way where it's really difficult to get many numbers and after 10-15 numbers you usually get stuck, but eventually you'll just slowly work out the more advanced logical sequencing and it becomes a bit easier to get through them. :) Keep at it, you'll definitely get there.
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by gimp »

I did a few diabolical puzzles.

My strategy was when i would be stuck i would exhaust every square, and list all possibilities of every square. Once i found one that had only two possibilities i would simply guess one and go through the rest of the puzzle with that being my guess. If the guess later down the line shows inconsistencies then i know that original guess was incorrect. On one puzzle i had both guesses get me stuck and i had to break the chain again with another two possibilities. I had to do the whole puzzle in three different combinations before everything turned out right. In the diabolical puzzles i could find myself stuck after just 5 or 6 squares being filled, sometimes less.

There may be a more efficient way, but at the diabolical (evil in your case) level my brain can only solve them by trial by error, even though i am doing all the tricks that solve the hard puzzles.
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pawq
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by pawq »

I did evil by penciling all possibilities and then systematically removing them and filling out solutions, no advanced gakkery needed for this too
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Lee
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by Lee »

pawq wrote: 21 Jan 2020, 00:27 I did evil by penciling all possibilities and then systematically removing them and filling out solutions, no advanced gakkery needed for this too
I did this too and it worked.
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by kuchitsu »

Wait, so you guys take notes? Did knock and SveinR also use them for the evil puzzle? I thought it's considered kinda lame since the process becomes a lot more mechanical and less about using your head well (and also Hikaru Nakamura said that it's for losers or something :D). Or is it the standard approach to sudoku?
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by pawq »

Imo need 400XB brain ram to do hard ones without notes :D
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by SveinR »

No note-taking, that's no fun :P
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Zweq
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by Zweq »

wow i've solved evil puzles on that very site some months ago) my success rate is not 100% though because i quitted a couple of puzzles after 2h. No idea if they're always solvable with basic techniques, i hope so.
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by FinMan »

Not always solvable with basic technique imo but solvable with logic (no guessing). Ofc this depends on what you consider basic.

my brainium expert pr is 4:29, but its just mainly luck to get a good board, though expert always seems to require non-basic techniques.

this is where i learnt some tech, really, really good tutorials, maybe best teaching material out there of anything i saw basically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvn93z1 ... lgvtuwO5JE
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by knock »

I used to do the notes when I first started out, I think it's a vital part in getting an understanding of harder puzzles.

The problem is you can take notes of all options for all squares and still have a min of 2 in every square. That's where the logic comes into play. My best suggestion would be to just keep trying, it seems to be one of those things where once you see it you can't unsee it.
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by gimp »

Best time on this evil puzzle now is 29 minutes.
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by knock »

Anyone playing the sudokus with diff game rules? Sandwich, snake etc?

https://cracking-the-cryptic.web.app/sudoku/Fb3fH2MB6n
This thing took me just over 2hrs.

Horizontal grey squares has to be 2 numbers apart, vertical 3.
Also, knights move (chess) rule comes into play. So you can't have the same number a knights move away.

There's some cool concepts out there.
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by Tigro »

I've been following and solving Cracking-the-cryptic for a while, and it has been mega enjoyable. Classic sudoku became bore to me, but all those wacky rules are great. And it still boggles my mind how someone can come up with such great puzzles.
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by Grace »

Also following cracking the cryptic for some time. I really enjoy it and have gotten quite a lot better at sudoku for watching them!
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Re: Anyone good at sudoku here?

Post by FinMan »

Watched tons of cracking the cryptic as well, really cool sudokus there. Also nice that if get stuck I can just go watch the video until that point and most of the time the route to solve is 95% the same.
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