The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Marty R.]

For what it's worth, on the puzzles posted here, I use the Draw/Play feature on the Daily Sudoku site to populate the grid. That has cut down almost 100% on my puzzles that end up invalid, i.e., with duplicate numbers. Otherwise, everything else is pencil and paper.

[ArkieTech]

People can do what they want. We all have our own agendas and nothing is right or wrong.

amen!

[Marty R.]

People can do what they want. We all have our own agendas and nothing is right or wrong.

amen!

OK, I'll be the contrarian. Ostensibly, we're just having some fun doing puzzles, chuckling at the "D" words and posting our solutions, comparing ours with the others. On the other hand, this is a de facto competition with everyone looking for the one-step chain, which is the Holy Grail. When you talk about a competition it's not a level playing field if some people are doing everything manually and others are getting computer help.

Of course, that's easy to say when I'm a pencil-and-paper guy; I might not be in favor of disclosure if I were getting computer help. Nevertheless, to the casual observer, he might look at two identical solutions, not realizing that one might've taken five minutes on the computer and the other sweating it out for two hours with his pencil and eraser.

But in the end, Luke is correct, people can do what they want because there are no posted rules, so I guess he's also right when says there's no right or wrong.

[gurth]

People can do what they want. We all have our own agendas and nothing is right or wrong.

amen!

- I fully agree. A philosophy of tolerance and acceptance.

[SteveG48]

People can do what they want. We all have our own agendas and nothing is right or wrong.

amen!

- I fully agree. A philosophy of tolerance and acceptance.

I agree as well, but I also agree with Marty. If we're going to compare solutions and techniques and, hopefully, learn something, it helps to have a common starting point. Hence, an informal agreement on what constitute "basic moves" makes sense.

[DonM]

Since this thread was resurrected after one year, my guess is that the agenda has more to do with comments in more recent threads rather than those of Luke and Marty's a year ago. Besides, Luke's comment was never meant to be taken to an extreme.

And the extreme is one that has occurred since sudoku notations were standardized (well, as much as possible) in 2007 and 2008 whereby individuals arrive in forums where solvers are using an agreed upon notation (in this case Eureka) to compare and enjoy each others' solutions and said individuals insist upon using their own concocted notation and then get in a snit when it isn't accepted.

The fact is that an individual can choose to believe that there is no right or wrong in how a solution is presented, but the fact also is that if a totally non-standard notation is used, absolutely no one is going to bother trying to figure it out. Too bad because sometimes I'm sure the solution has value.