The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Enigma]

Anyone else think today's was disappointing ? Not symmetrical and a bunch of milds. I reckoned this was the easiest yet at about 30 mins to solve... per a previous week I'd love to see a really fiendish Samurai where you have to work to complete the interlocking boxes.

[PaulIQ164]

Yeah, I did it in about the same time, too. Made kind of a change though, seeing as I'd messed up last week's quite bad. And it is symmetrical - the entire puzzle is symmetrical through being turned upside down.

[Enigma]

Not so... box 4 in grid 1 isn't the mirror of box 6 in grid 5.

[PaulIQ164]

So it isn't. My mistake, sorry.

[demdempster]

Yet another disappointing Samurai. Only the first couple of the eight or so that have been published have been in the least challenging.

The Times seems to be going down the road of pretending its puzzles are getting harder whilst simultaneously making them easier.

Any ideas why?

[george-no1]

I am similarly disappointed with this week's, it only took me exactly half of the recommended time (i.e. 29 minutes) and I wasn't going at it very hard - I could easily have got it under 25 minutes.

I'm pretty sure 58 minutes wasn't the recommended time that the Japanese creators set, and I'm equally as sure that The Times only put this as the recommended time to encourage beginners that their time of 2 hours isn't so bad after all, and therefore get them buying the Saturday Times every week (which is £1.10) so that they can improve.

The abilities of the users of this forum are not representative of the abilities of the other 50,000 people who buy the times every day, and so by putting a long recommended time they appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator, which is probably a sound business strategy.

Unfortunately they have probably made the Samurais easier for the same reason, which is annoying for us, but I'm afraid we'll probably have to get used to it. Also, you may have noticed that they have stopped asking for people to send in the time it took them to solve it. This is probably because they got lots of entries saying 2 hours for a '43 minute' puzzle, and have decided to, as demdempster nicely puts it:

go down the road of pretending its puzzles are getting harder whilst simultaneously making them easier.

Does anyone agree with me?

George

[Enigma]

George,

I agree with you. What I'm tempted to do sometime is to go back and have another crack at one of the first couple of Samurais printed in the Times to see whether it's just experience/technique that brings the time down. One thought I had was that it may well be harder to create fiendish Sudokus as once you've got the interlocking boxes completed - and I suspect that's the route that most of us head down first - you're a substantial way then to actually completing each peripheral grid. What I'd love to see is a Samurai where you have to use fiendish techniques (for me that means resorting to pencil marks) to get as far as the completion of the interlocking boxes. It was that stage of this week's that took me about 15 mins - on par with a single tricky fiendish - whereas the peripheral grids then took about 3-4 mins each to complete. One pleasing thing for me was that I didn't need to resort to pencil marks, although perversely I'd have prefered to (with a harder puzzle of course).

Next on the wishlist would be for Book 4 in the Times series to be just Samurai Sudokus - or at least have a dozen or so (maybe books 2 and 3 have some - I've only bought book 1). I'd have thought there would be a good market for this....

Paul

[jonallen1966]

I found it very quick to do too.

I just found this
http://sudoku.top-notch.co.uk/gattai5.asp
which has some more versions.
Not had time to try them yet.

[Enigma]

Jon,

Thanks... I've just tried the first one that's free and it's much better - enjoyed doing it a lot more than the last couple of Times ones. If any of you like the Samurais and want more of a challenge, this is a good link.

Paul