The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[rolf1988]

Hi at all,

I fall over a untypical kind of Sodoku and have no idea how to solve it. There are just Signs that tell me higher or lower but i have really no idea how to begin? Is someone here able to solve this MASTER Sodoku??? Here is the link to it:

http://img4.fotos-hochladen.net/uploads/sudoku73bizlcf6d.jpg

Thanks for your help.

[JasonLion]

There is a nice tutorial on solving greater/less than Sudoku at http://stuckinthecube.blogspot.com/2007/05/solving-greater-than-sudoku-puzzles.html. Their examples have quite a few < > marks, and thus are easier to solve than your example, but the basic principals still hold.

[rolf1988]

oh man. This Sudoku really burns my mind. I tried to figure out some numbers by determinating the candidates. But it's still more than hard... is someone able to give me a hint

Here my result till now:
http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/9763/blafb.jpg

[JasonLion]

Did you notice that R456789C3 all can't be 9? That means that R123C3 must be 9, so R123C12 can't be 9. Likewise, the 9's in C5 are all in B5, so the 9s in B5 in C46 can be eliminated. That leads to the placement of several 9s. And each of those have cascading effects, eliminating 8s in the local area, and so on.

This isn't a simple puzzle. If you haven't played greater than/less than Sudoku a fair bit before, you should practice on simpler puzzles for a while.