Times Killer sat 4 feb 2006

For fans of Killer Sudoku, Samurai Sudoku and other variants

Postby CathyW » Tue Feb 07, 2006 9:55 am

The Times have published an apology above today's Killer puzzle.:)
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Postby afjt » Tue Feb 07, 2006 11:26 am

Fortunately I had spotted this thread before I attempted the puzzle. Knowing that 2 cage totals were incorrect, rather than correct them, I decided to ignore them (ie treat them as unknown) and see if I got a unique solution. I did !
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Postby Philip Roe » Tue Feb 07, 2006 12:20 pm

afjt wrote:Fortunately I had spotted this thread before I attempted the puzzle. Knowing that 2 cage totals were incorrect, rather than correct them, I decided to ignore them (ie treat them as unknown) and see if I got a unique solution. I did !


Gosh! And was "your" solution the same as the Times's?
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Postby afjt » Tue Feb 07, 2006 3:35 pm

The solution was the same as that printed in the Times.
What this shows is that we don't necessarily need to know ALL the cage totals for a puzzle to have a unique solution.
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Postby Philip Roe » Tue Feb 07, 2006 5:02 pm

afjt wrote:The solution was the same as that printed in the Times.
What this shows is that we don't necessarily need to know ALL the cage totals for a puzzle to have a unique solution.


Thanks. I have sometimes thought we get too much information. We could always drop one cage sum as the grand total is 405 but you dropped two. Interesting.
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Postby CathyW » Tue Feb 07, 2006 5:54 pm

Philip - if you want a harder Killer with some cages missing try the third puzzle here from Miyuki Misawa

The > < = puzzle on another page at that site is also interesting!
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Postby Philip Roe » Wed Feb 08, 2006 1:32 pm

CathyW wrote:Philip - if you want a harder Killer with some cages missing try the third puzzle here from Miyuki Misawa

The > < = puzzle on another page at that site is also interesting!


Thank you Cathy.:D
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Postby black dog » Wed Feb 08, 2006 10:57 pm

Philip Roe wrote:
afjt wrote:The solution was the same as that printed in the Times.
What this shows is that we don't necessarily need to know ALL the cage totals for a puzzle to have a unique solution.


Thanks. I have sometimes thought we get too much information. We could always drop one cage sum as the grand total is 405 but you dropped two. Interesting.


I checked the cage sum total on this puzzle and it added up to 405. So, although there were in fact two incorrect cage sums, you had no way of knowing that from the total: if any were wrong, how many were wrong, and which ones were wrong. That makes the puzzle impossible in my book.
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Postby afjt » Fri Feb 10, 2006 11:26 am

black dog wrote:I checked the cage sum total on this puzzle and it added up to 405. So, although there were in fact two incorrect cage sums, you had no way of knowing that from the total: if any were wrong, how many were wrong, and which ones were wrong. That makes the puzzle impossible in my book.


I agree. However, in this case, I already knew (from this forum) that those 2 cage totals were wrong (and also what they should be) - I just decided, as an academic exercise, to treat them as unknowns.
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