The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[jbf1]

Well, I've looked at a few tips and read a few posts here, but they don't seem to sink in quite so well until I see them in action. Here's where I'm at with a "medium" sample. The Easy puzzles seem to go pretty quickly.

Code: Select all

    4 |   5   | 3 6   |
5 6 2 | 1 3 7 | 8 4 9 |
3     |   4   |     5 |
------+-------+--------
4 8   | 7     | 5   3 |
  5   | 4   3 | 6     |
  3 6 | 5     | 4 7   |
------+-------+--------
  4 3 | 2 1 5 |     6 |
1   5 |     4 |   3   |
6 2   | 3 7   | 1 5 4 |


If you could help me place the next number and tell me why, I would appreciate it. I know I;m missing something, I'm just not sure if it's a technique or something that would be more obvious for me. I've got lots of cells down to a few possibilities or numbers certain to be in one of a pair of cells, but I can't seem to make any of them definite.

Oh, and any tips for working towards the advanced techniques I hear about are appreciated.


Thanks...
jbf1

[/code]

[jbf1]

Feeling I should have tried a bit more before posting:

Sudoku Susser is a pretty cool program. The single step function got me going again, by pointing out that R7C8 must be 8. So I was missing something obvious: block 6's 9 needed to be in Column 8, which forced the conclusion above.


For any other newb-types: Check out Sudoku Susser, for mac, win, linux. It gives reasoning, and you can paste puzzles into it. Pretty cool.


Thanks for your time!
jbf

Edit, And even worse, I had made a (some?) mistakes in what I had completed so far. ugh. Doubly sorry to waste your time.