The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[PaulIQ164]

Today's Fiendish puzzle (No. 434) can be solved entirely with naked singles. Nevertheless, Pappocom's software still rates it as HARD, presumably owing to some sort of slight anomaly in the grading algorithm. (Having said this, I find naked singles no easier to find than hidden ones when solving - perhaps even harder.) Is this the easiest Fiendish/HARD puzzle ever?

[Bigtone53]

Is this the easiest Fiendish/HARD puzzle ever?

To be honest, I mucked it up first time (I blame the train), but armed with my new friend, a Pritt Correction mouse, I started again and it was indeed straightforward. Perhaps Poppadom shold base their difficulty level on feedback from the solvers, so that if their algorithm says 'difficulty 3.2' or whatever, and the feedback is that it was easy, 3.2's would be easy henceforth. There is no shortage of people here with views on the difficulty or otherwise of particular puzzles.

[Jules]

suffice to say it was one of the easiest fiendish's I can recall - can not recall getting stuck anywhere

[boaz]

I did it quicker than the last two days difficults

[nj3h]

According to Simon's Sadman Sudoku program, the rating is Trivial. Just single eliminations for the entire puzzle.

[Pi]

Yes it was a shame that it didn't require any advanced techniques.

However that was harder that most difficult ones but i think that a fiendish should really require at least 1 harder technique, even if it was just a naked pair

[PaulIQ164]

I certainly think it's a good thing that Pappocom's difficulty algorithms are more complex than just "This uses techniques x-y-z, so it's such-and-such a difficulty". I guess the flipside is that sometimes you get oddities like this.

[possum]

Today's was not as easy as yesterday's. Couldn't just rely on naked singles. Had to be at least partially clothed.

[udosuk]

I thought the mild puzzle on that day (433) looked more difficult than the supposed fiendish one (434), since it contains quite a few hidden singles. Could it be that the times staff accidentally swapped them, seeing they have similar number of clues? Not that 433 is worthy to be a fiendish anyway (or could someone with the appropriate program give it a check?).

[Pi]

The fiendish one did come out as a papocomm hard and so i suppose it should be labeled fiendish, it is just the easy end of the fiendish spectrum

[possum]

I thought today's was quite difficult. Anyone else think so?

[PaulIQ164]

Yeah, it was a tricky one. Yesterday's was too. It's some kind of fiendish karma.

[Pat]

I certainly think it's a good thing that Pappocom's difficulty algorithms are more complex than just "This uses techniques x-y-z, so it's such-and-such a difficulty".

I guess the flipside is that sometimes you get oddities like this.

it seems that Basic Elimination is sufficient for solving most of Pappocom's Medium puzzles, and also a significant portion of the Hard puzzles.

more recently, a greater oddity has been observed: a Pappocom Very Hard puzzle, The Sunday Times #31 can also be solved by Basic Elimination. ( first reported by tarek. )


~ Pat

[Pi]

i thought saturday 8th july had a v.easy one, it took me under 3 mins to complete which is quick for me, can someone run this through "sudoku " for me?

[Pat]

i thought saturday 8th july had a v.easy one, it took me under 3 mins to complete which is quick for me, can someone run this through "sudoku" for me?

the Pappocom software does rate it Hard



#843 (2006.Jul.8)

Code: Select all

 8 . . | 5 . 2 | . . 9
 . 5 . | . 7 . | . 1 .
 . . . | . . . | . . .
-------+-------+------
 . 3 . | 8 . 9 | . 4 .
 . 6 2 | . . . | 8 9 .
 . 1 . | 2 . 6 | . 7 .
-------+-------+------
 . . . | . . . | . . .
 . 8 . | . 3 . | . 2 .
 2 . . | 6 . 4 | . . 5