The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Guest]

ive been doing these since about noon today when my maths teacher got me hooked i was wondering is there a a formula or function that you could use to solve these? i mean u can use self simlilar processes to find the possisions of the maximum amount of queens on a single chess board with them attacking could u assignm the same principles to these puzzles

[Guest]

Hi .
this is what I did to calculate possibilities without needing to keep them in my head, or scribbling on paper and then crossing out as you go along.
This won't just solve the problem and there are some problems with many decision paths. IE. where this is no single answer for a cell and you have to keep choosing from available options. These do leed to dead ends.
But it is a tool to highlight what the available valid options are for each cell as you go through solving the puzzle. It's so nice when I keep seeing green cells that indicate only one valid value is left for a cell, I plug it in and yet another cell goes green.

History: I saw a puzzle in the paper and thought about how it should be solved. Generally a cell can only contain valid values that have not been used acording to the rules, (Rows,Columns,Groups). Can I create a spreadsheet to display the valid values for each cell? Well it took a day between work and a few wrong turns to create the tool.
Testing: So I grabbed your hard to solve puzzle, put the initial values in, and just as I expected not one cell showed a single valid value (Green) only doubles (Yellow). That is many cells showed the value could be 2 or 5 for example.
Solved: So I jumped in and selected one of the 2 possible values. Must have picked the right one, as then single valid values for other cells were then presented.
Result: In about 5 minutes I had the answer with very little mind activity, excluding the day it took to design the spreadsheet.

639.254.781
158.796.324
274.831.965

493.182.657
517.649.238
826.375.149

341.567.892
765.928.413
982.413.576

Thanks