The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[rosenblumr]

I just started doing these a couple of days ago, they are quite addicting. I have only done about 10 or so of the simple puzzles I from the SW downloaded from the site.

What is a "decent" time? How long should it take one to solve one of these? Where I am solving these, I feel like I am WAY to slow.

Where I am not competing with anyone, I want to have some idea when to move to the next level.

Thanks in advance.

[Hud]

Welcome aboard. I suppose your time depends on the level of difficulty of the puzzles you're doing. I know when I first started, sometimes I put hours into a puzzle before finding the magic clue. I believe my average for a V. Hard puzzle is now around 15 or 16 minutes and best is around 9. Feel free to ask for tips on this forum since that's what most of us did when we got started.

Naturally, the very first puzzle I did after that post clocked in at a blistering 35 minutes. I guess that'll skew the old average.

[lunababy_moonchild]

Where I am not competing with anyone, I want to have some idea when to move to the next level.

Thanks in advance.

Hello Rosenblumr and welcome to the Forum. I don't think that there are any standard solving times, it's just your personal best. The first one I did didn't have a rating, although the instructions did say that it was "one of the easier ones, since this was the first one to be published" - and it wasn't called sudoku! I thought it was a simple little game that would take me a matter of moments when in actual fact it totally absorbed me for over an hour (maybe more, I wasn't timing myself).

It depends a great deal on the difficulty of the puzzle also, although as you can see Hud is right up there when it comes to fast - to me 35 minutes for a V.Hard is astonishingly fast. I think it depends on personal preference. If timing is important to you then concentrate on getting faster and that would take practice and learning advanced techniques/doing without pencil marks. Myself, I enjoy the solving process of the puzzle, especially if it's a well constructed, symmetrical and challenging puzzle, so timing isn't as important to me as finishing the puzzle - in the past I've completed a Pappocom Fiendish in 3 days!

I know when to progress to a higher level because the level of puzzle I'm solving is too easy for me, i.e. it starts to feel like I'm just filling in the numbers and not thinking about how to solve it which ceases to be challenging, but that's personal preference. I also like to change puzzle setter (i.e. who creates the puzzle) from time to time to keep me challenged and sometimes this entails going down a level and thus affects my speed.

Timing of puzzles comes into it's own when you are competing in competitions. Other than that I think that how you play the game in general is all personal preference.

Luna

[Pi]

The difficulty does vary a lot from puzzle to puzzle, newspaper ones usually take me between 1 & 5 minutes but hard ones from the internet take up to half an hour.
About 5 minutes is a typical time for a fairly easy puzzle and there is no shame in taking around 20 for a harder one such as the Pappocom Hard.
After a while you will sort of work out what time is good for you