Red Ed wrote:denis_berthier wrote:Using the subsets/supersets method, can one generate puzzles outside T&E(1) with known bias?
I know this is beyond the practical reach of top-down or controlled-bias generators (the complement of T&E(1) contains less than 1 minimal in ~ 30,000,000).
What's T&E(1)? What do the (known) puzzles outside of T&E(1) typically look like -- are they minimal, and what numbers of clues?
T&E(1): you must have seen in the "grey zone" thread. Otherwise, you can see section 5.6 of my last book ("
Pattern-Based Constraint Satisfaction").
non-T&E(1), or non-T&E for short, is the tail of the distribution wrt hardness. So, this is a hard problem anyway.
My vague estimate of 1 puzzle in ~30,000,000 relies on calculations by
Blue, who found only 2 in ~60,000,000 by top-down generation (in computations that weren't specially tailored for this problem).
I think non-T&E is a good way of defining the tail of the distribution:
- unlike any definition based on SER bounds, it is stable wrt to isos (and wrt to "analogy", i.e. the restricted logical equivalence row/col block/square);
- it is (equivalent to) a pure logic definition (not solvable by braids);
- it is (relatively) easy to compute;
- it is broad enough to include all the known "hardest".
All the puzzles I speak of here are minimal. It'd be too easy to take any minimal and to delete clues until it is no longer in T&E (it may not work for all the minimals, but it should work often).
As for how non-T&E puzzles look (i.e. whether they have any peculiarities), I think no one can say for sure as of now. But it's unlikely that they have any exterior sign of non-T&E-ishness. [I haven't followed the work on UAs and I don't know if there's any relation between UAs and (any notion of) hardness, but if so, it might be a useful filter].
Number of clues: any (or, if this is too hard - any reachable number).
Why do I think this problem might be reachable by subset/superset?
We don't know how non-T&E puzzles are scattered within all the minimals, in particular whether all/most of the complete grids have any. If the latter was true, there would be so few for each complete grid that controlled-bias would have no chance to reach them; perhaps, chances would be better for subset/superset, as it looks systematically for all the minimals related to an s-clue sub-grid (but, of course, all depends also on how non-T&E puzzles are scattered among the s-clue sub-grids).
If they are more concentrated on a small part of the complete grids, chances are very low by either method.