The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Marc]

I'm rather new to sudoku, but I'm already love this.
I'm curious about one thing : when I do difficult sudoku (guardian, times...), it's rather common that at one moment I do a mistake...then continue without seeing that...then when I'm nearly finished, it appears that's it 's definitively impossible to fill the very last empty spaces. Very frustrating! And most of the times, it's impossible to see where the mistake is and I have to restart at the very beginning.
Does it happens to you? Is there any tips to avoid to restart at the beginning?

[Karyobin]

Used to. Be very careful.

To be serious though, that situation bothered me when I began doing them, than I noticed that the mistakes just got fewer and fewer. I think it's a case of the correct logical steps becoming kind of hard-wired, you spot things more easily and you know it's right coz it has been in the past. As you improve you tend to move beyond the flawed logical steps that gave the original errors. You won't really notice this development, you just start completing them with greater ease.

[Doyle]

I'm still at that stage also, been solving less than a month, but am taking steps that help. One thing that does: as you are about to ink in the big number, do a quick double-check of row, column, box and (most importantly) your reasoning for entering the value. When your thought processes are flowing smoothly, as they should be, all this takes just a second or two.