The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Madolite]

Hey guys, so I read that the Guinness World Record of Speed Sudoku is held by Thomas Snyder @ 1 minute and 23.93 seconds.
https://sudoku.com/how-to-play/who-has-the-guinness-world-record-for-fastest-sudoku-player/

It so turns out that I have beaten that time @ 1 min 16 seconds. However, I did so using Sudoku Epic, a software that highlights numbers and other things. Which means, as I'm already assuming, that this isn't really beating the world record because I'm probably not adhering to some strict set of rules. For instance, I assume that Thomas had to solve his Sudoku puzzle on paper, correct? Which means that he had no tools for helping him speed up his solution. He had to visualize everything in his mind (and certainly not pencil mark anything cause that's several seconds lost). Secondly, my average time is closer to 2m (although this varies with the puzzle ofc).

So, my question is this:
What are the exact rules for beating the world record in Speed Sudoku? Thanks. I'll probably not beat him by following the rules, but it'd be fun to see how fast I could do it without any help.

[StrmCkr]

Thomas Snyder is good for a us player however other countries have even faster.

i used to run against him and many others faster solvers from the chez team.

used to practice Sudoku grids under 45 seconds in online hosted sites with some as low as 28 seconds. so no your not even close. we use zero aids in solving for speed just a mouse and number pad, often top times comes down to a lucky guess.

i will not go further on the above subject.

his Guinness time is pen and paper solved only with zero aids and watched by multiple judges at a sudoku world competition event.

that record is old and should be updated for the sub 1 min marks the chez players have accomplished live on paper in other world competitions. however the record setting puzzles are specifically designed for the players to break the old record with more difficulty criteria in its solving path.

more over this is the more recent on the subject.
http://sudokucup.com/node/754

[SpAce]

i used to run against him and many others faster solvers from the chez team.

used to practice Sudoku grids under 45 seconds in online hosted sites with some as low as 28 seconds. so no your not even close. we use zero aids in solving for speed just a mouse and number pad, often top times comes down to a lucky guess.

Impressive. Speed-solving is not high up on my own priority list, but sometimes (rarely) I time myself just to put some pressure and see if there's any improvement. My record for the 1-star level of our local newspaper puzzle is 2:20, which in this company seems awful. For the 5-star level, which requires easy non-basics (UR, X-Wing, Skyscraper, etc), it's 11 minutes (solved with an X-Wing). Both were pencil&paper without any pm.

[Madolite]

All right, awesome I thought there was something funky going on with Google, given that Thomas Snyder made that record over a decade ago, back in 2006.
Thanks for the headsup, StrmCkr, I'll check out your Sudoku Cup link.

[999_Springs]

yeah solving with pen and paper and no pencilmarks is a lot slower than mouse and keyboard online

a lot of guinness world records in general are just out-dated beause nobody bothers to keep them updated, i guess this one is no exception

one thing i'm wondering with speed solving is does there have to be a minimum difficulty requirement for a sudoku and if so how is it determined? like for easy all-singles puzzles is there like a maximum clue count for it to be a puzzle or something like that. at this level puzzles are almost never minimal, so minimality doesn't work as a requirement. what's stopping someone from setting a puzzle in a competition with like 20 clues missing and having that as a world record worthy puzzle? and you can still claim that it was hard enough because some of the daily puzzles posted by arkietech and others here have the sticking point at 20 or fewer from the end. maybe it's like speed rubik's cubing where the scramble is predetermined and has to be a certain number of moves away from the starting point

edit: oh i see strmckr's link that defines 27 clues, but that's only like one very specific condition for difficulty - and it looks like the puzzle designer just made it up seeing as the "old" record was so far away from the new one

space: it's pretty well known that once you go beyond pairs and box-lines (and easy UR's) and want to speed solve you're better off just guessing to save time, and there is a huge rabbit hole in the speedsolving community that argues whether or not guessing should or shouldn't be a part of speed solving

i remember doing easy trashy newspaper puzzles at school in my latin teacher's classroom and my best was like 1:30 or something

i think there are like speedsolving forums somewhere but i don't know where

edit: wow i haven't seen sudoku.com posted here in a long, LONGGGGG time. i remember when sudoku.com used to host our forums but then they accidentally got rid of all of them and when we asked them, nobody knew that they existed. those were more carefree times

[StrmCkr]

i remember when sudoku.com used to host our forums but then they accidentally got rid of all of them and when we asked them, nobody knew that they existed. those were more carefree times

it was more like they didn't care to have a backup for the forums, and took forever for them to get back to us with reasons to why it crashed... {critical hard drive failure with no backups} thankfully some of the forum members here held complete scans of the forums coupled with the waybackmachine web-crawler the guys rebuilt the forums

[qiuyanzhe]

An activity about challenging the World Record has been held during the latest WSC(World Sudoku Championship, November 2018, Prague), where 14-year-old Chinese girl Wang Shiyao broke the record by completing a "WR sudoku" in 54.44 seconds.

(As described by previous posts, to be a WR sudoku, the grid must have 27 givens, with 3 givens in each row/column/box.)

Personally, I don't think this record values much, because there has not been enough times of challenges, nor chances to challenge this(only a few WSC top players, not many times per year). So the ultimate limit for current top players may be much much faster.

[Madolite]

I'm gonna let bygones be bygones, since it's not a big deal for me, even in the least. But:

For the record, I think it's extremely sloppy (principally speaking) of Google/Guinness (or whomever) to still cite Thomas Snyder as the world's fastest Sudoku player, especially after over a decade of passing time. Like, when I Google this, I literally cannot find any other World Record claim (although maybe browsing through multiple pages of Google results might eventually uncover it). I've since gotten an answer from you guys, so I know what to look for now. But it just seems incredibly trashy, factually speaking, that (public) information isn't easily available unless you join some forum somewhere. Of course, I joined here to generally learn about Sudoku, but I'm just saying for the sake of argument. Super annoying when you try to Google something and you get misinformed.

a lot of guinness world records in general are just out-dated beause nobody bothers to keep them updated, i guess this one is no exception

Yeah, case in point right there. ^

[dobrichev]

I just solved a sudoku on websodoku.com for 15 minutes and 55 seconds. The displayed ad was "5 Best Herbs for Dementia".

[Mathimagics]

I just solved a sudoku on websodoku.com for 15 minutes and 55 seconds. The displayed ad was "5 Best Herbs for Dementia".

Priceless, Mladen!

[999_Springs]

nice one, dobrichev

while we're messing around on this topic, i'd like to challenge all of you to see if you guys can beat my best time on sudoku which i posted about here in 2010. go on, i dare you.

[Madolite]

I just solved a sudoku on websodoku.com for 15 minutes and 55 seconds. The displayed ad was "5 Best Herbs for Dementia".