The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[pmlabrier]

OK, my name is Paul and I am addicted to Sudoku. There I said it, although I am not looking to recover ;)

I am looking for a SudoKu program for the PC that will let me solve them the way I do on paper. I want to be able to list all the possibilities in the lower 1/5 of each square and eliminate them as I solve.

I find solving them manually on most PC software much harder because I cannot keep track of the possibles and eliminate them. I have to do this in my head.

I do not think this would be really hard, but I have not come across any software that allows this. Many will display this automatically, but to me that is a cheat. I want to find them and resolve it my self.

Does anyone know of anything like this? If not, this is a challenge to programmers!

Paul

[Ruud]

You might want to try my Sudo Cue program.

It allows you to choose between:

1. Marks automatically updated with each solver step;
2. Marks automatically updated, but only for candidates that would violate the rules. (same digit already present in row, column or box)
3a. Marks updated manually
3b. Marks updated like in option 2, but further eliminations are done manually. (my pref setting)

Marks can be displayed as little numbers or as dots.
The program can be downloaded from my website.

Ruud.

[jmwismer]

Try this one:
http://www.sudokujm.com

you can apply manually the kind of algorithms that you do when you solve a grid manually.

It got me un-stuck a few times.

[pmlabrier]

Try this one:
http://www.sudokujm.com

you can apply manually the kind of algorithms that you do when you solve a grid manually.

It got me un-stuck a few times.

I tried to download it, but when I click on the link or r-click qnd use SAVE-AS it only takes me to a non-english web page.

Paul

[Shazbot]

Pappocom sudoku, from THIS website, allows you to do all this manually. You have to enter the candidates manually (takes a couple of minutes at the start of the puzzle if you want to do it straight away - an "autofill" would be nice here), and when you place a number you have to manually eliminate it from other cells. It gives hints, but only if the cells are blank (no candidates entered, which undoes all your prior work), so I've never used it. But I believe the hint it gives is not necessarily the next logical move - it just places one number in the correct position, but you may not understand why.

Simple Sudoku enters all the candidates automatically at the start of the puzzle, and as you place numbers, candidates are automatically eliminated. I like the hints facility and the ability to highlight cells with particular candidates, but find the automatic elimination of candidates when you place a number, and the bold formatting of naked singles, makes it just a little too easy - with easy puzzles (just naked and hidden singles) I like to have to scan and compare groups, but with this program it's too obvious - I only have to look for text where the formatting stands out and I don't have to pay any attention to what the number is or what numbers are in surrounding cells.

These are the only two programs I've used, in addition to my own Excel solver, so I'll be interested to see what other programs pop up here.

[jmwismer]

try again, I could download ok.

maybe the server saturated when you tried to access it?

[pmlabrier]

Sudoku by Sandman (Shareware) does pretty much exactly what I am looking for. You can set it so that you enter a number in "pencil" by right clicking and in "ink" by left clicking. It also has all the hint/cheat features also.

The url is http://www.simes.clara.co.uk/programs/sudoku.htm

Enjoy,

Paul