The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Pupp]

Just curious what the minimum difficulty is for 17 clue puzzles.

Right now, I'm solving puzzles rating between 3.0 and3.5 on SudoExplainer.

Sudoku is a curious game on how they rate the difficulty of puzzles, with tens of thousands of puzzles rated essentially beyond nightmare. Makes "hard" levels seem tepidly easy if your only using a puzzle's rating to describe it's difficulty, even though it's taken me a few weeks from doing my first hard puzzle, to the point of becoming somewhat proficient at those. According to Sudoku Explainer, the "hard 1" puzzles I'm doing rate only between 3.0 and 3.4 in difficulty.

I plugged in a" Daily Nightmare" puzzle from SudoCue, and that was rated about 7.

[mith]

A couple of the ones mentioned here solve with singles:

17-clue-puzzles-t32953.html

[Pupp]

Thanks

[Mathimagics]

Easy puzzles are the most prevalent, it seems. Nearly half of the known 17C/18C puzzles are solvable with singles only.

[Pupp]

I solved my first 17 clue puzzle. Sudoku Explainer rated it at only 2.6

000000010400000000020000000000050407008000300001090000300400200050100000000806000

That was the first puzzle from the 49K plus Sudoku 17 clue file you can download here: https://sites.google.com/site/dobrichev/sudoku-puzzle-collections

[Pupp]

This is off topic, but I didn't want to start a new thread for such a minor detail....

I emailed the devs for Andoku, and they said eventually they want to add support for *.sdm files. I didn't ask, but they also mentioned that Anduko 3 has 20,000 puzzles. I hadn't realized that it had anywhere near that many.

They did say that they weren't sure when they'd get a chance to even start programming *.sdm support, but I doubt they'd even look into it before early 2021, and even then that might be optimistic.

[1to9only]

This is off topic, but I didn't want to start a new thread for such a minor detail....

PseudoFish's Hodoku (I mentioned here) has a Quick Browse feature.

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Quick Browse

Quick Browse was added to Hodoku to allow navigating through massive pre-generated lists of puzzles. The aim is to help puzzle makers to quickly hand select puzzles of their choice.

Each line must start with an 81 character long import line.

After a whitespace, import lines can be followed with however many notes about the particular puzzle. Hodoku and QQWing tend to sppend such meta data. The notes are ignored when loading it into the Quick Browser which can be quite convenient.


The Pre-release Hodoku.jar can be downloaded here.

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Hodoku-2.3.1
PseudoFish released this on 14 Jan

Features:

Added Quick Browse in the File menu
Can manually paste a list of import lines
Can load a file containing a list of import lines
Allows to quickly browse/load puzzles into Hodoku
Each line must start with an import line
Notes to the right of the import lines are ignored


I have not tried out the Quick Browse feature.

[Pupp]

Andoku is for android phones. I'll check out Hodoku though.

Right now, I just use SudoCue to look for puzzles off the large collections on my desktop, then input to puzzle manually into one of my android Sudoku apps on my phone.

Considering I have two different android sudoku apps with over 39,000 puzzles between them, it's not a big deal to manually input a specific puzzle I want to try and solve.

Mainly I just do thematic puzzles just for fun. Otherwise, I just keep practicing and learning to do harder puzzles. Right now I'm solving puzzles rated around 3.0 to 3.4 on Sudoku Explainer. Not quite ready for the next level yet.

The two android programs I use are Sudoku 10,000 and Andoku 3.

I used to say I was doing "hard" puzzles, but it became clear that using the puzzle rating is more accurate. What's considered "hard" in one program might be considered "medium" or "intermediate" in a different app, website, or magazine.

Let's not get into what constitutes a youtube video on solving "hard" puzzles. One video I watched a while back was how to solve a "diabolical" puzzle, which I plugged into Sudoku Explainer that was barely over a "2" rating.

Then today I looked up "tableing" or "tabling", trying to understand how tabling works. Got a video by some guy who starts the video talking about a "mallet". I didn't watch the entire video. I got halfway and he still didn't get around to the point of the video, but I think his audiance was the 7 to 11 year old crowd.

I'm not sure if tableing is a technique, or just slang for puzzles that can't be solved without some element of guessing. Those types of puzzles that are "unsolvable" by normal sudoku solvers.