AnotherLife wrote:I have come to the point where anomalies arise. If a theory does not accord with the experimental results, it needs to be corrected.
Let's keep all this real.
1) There has never been any theory in Sudoku Explainer - so, nothing to be corrected in this regard. There's a bunch of techniques that have never been popular, some very general (forcing chains..), some very specific (uniqueness...), all mixed in very arbitrary ways, with arbitrary thresholds on the size of chains for the associated ratings.
If that was not clear enough: from a theoretical point of view, SE is pure bullshit. But as I wrote in several places, the interest of SE is, in the mean, it gives some idea of the difficulty of the hardest step of a puzzle. That's why SE has been and remains the common reference. And that's why the author should be given the credit he deserves.
I wrote (and everybody knows) SE rates the "hardest step". As a result, any try to apply it to deal with the number of steps is totally absurd. Like using a clock to measure a red cell count.
Also, SER is based on a fixed set of rules. Adding rules will obviously change the rating. Criticisng SER for not producing the same rating as when one adds new rules is totally absurd.
2) In all this thread, I can't see any serious "experimental result".
AnotherLife's "results" are based on manual solving hundreds of very hard puzzles in a few days. Who can seriously believe in the resulting "classifications"?
yzfwsf computations seem to be more serious, as they are made by a computer. Unfortunately, I can't see anything related to rating puzzles. Only vague classifications not involving the lengths of chains.
The only thing that seems to be suggested form all this is, ALS chains are very weak patterns and are unable to be, in and of themselves, the backbone of a rating system.
Before trying to correct a theory that doesn't even exist, some thinking about rating systems seems to be necessary.
