The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Luke]

I'm a Sudoku zealot, but not an spreadsheet wizard.
In that light I request help in understanding x-cycles.

What I know of this technique comes from the links
found at Scanraid. One steered me to a thread in
this group. A poster by the name of Jeff is quite
the erudite fellow on the subject, but krikey, this
stuff requires a code writer's perspective.

http://forum.enjoysudoku.com/viewtopic.php?t=2752

Anyone got time to put this in layman's terms?

Luke in Ca

[Myth Jellies]

Not sure if you'll find this is any easier to understand, but I would call an X-Cycle either an Alternating Inference Chain or a Nice Loop that uses only a single digit. Turbot Fish, Simple Coloring, and Multi-Coloring also make similar reductions from the same set of data as an X-Cycle uses.

[Mike Barker]

Specifically for X-cycles try Jeff's post: http://forum.enjoysudoku.com/viewtopic.php?t=2752 . The link to this and other techniques including X-cycles big brothers (nice loops and AIC) are summarized here. As far as implementing X-cycles, I like Havard's strong link approach: http://forum.enjoysudoku.com/viewtopic.php?t=3326