The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Pupp]

I use Sudoku Explainer to rate puzzles, but I was curious what other programs are popular to rate the difficulty of puzzles.

[enxio27]

For years I've used Sudocue, by Ruud van der Werf. I like that it can rate huge batches of puzzles at once, and even give me a count of each major technique a puzzle requires. However, it is getting rather "long in the tooth", and I'm sure new techniques have been developed since it was last updated (at least 12 years ago now). It's still perfectly adequate for my purposes (my technique repertoire isn't very robust), but for most people here, serate (if I recall correctly, that's short for Sudoku Explainer rater) is much better. I've dabbled with Sudoku Explainer, but I really haven't done it enough to get a good handle on its capabilities and how to use it.

[Pupp]

I use Sudoku Explainer.

I haven't found a normal puzzle it hasn't been able to solve. That being said, it lists some esoteric techniques that may or may not be usable by humans, but those seem to be mostly at the Ludacris level puzzles.

[denis_berthier]

As should be expected, I use my own solver, SudoRules. I have shown that there are several pure logic, isomorphism invariant, ratings and that they can't be reduced to each other.
Rating is thus a matter of a personal choice of which rules you want to apply.