The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[CathyW]

The Times have published an apology above today's Killer puzzle.

[afjt]

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 !

[Philip Roe]

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?

[afjt]

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.

[Philip Roe]

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.

[CathyW]

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!

[Philip Roe]

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.

[black dog]

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.

[afjt]

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.