Su Doku

[GasBlaster]

Is anybody else hooked on these number puzzles?? They are driving me

[stigproducts]

Bloody thing- did you try it today? It took me hours, then i got to the last square and realised I had screwed up somewhere. Arghhhh

[iansull]

the fiendish puzzles are the only ones i find difficult and today was the first day i finished a fiendish puzzle!

it is bloody addictive though and it took bloody ages to do with much head scratching!

pretty addicted to the back page of T2 now!

[GasBlaster]

Finished todays, then rooted in bin for old copies from before I was hooked. Very sad!

[iansull]

what would be very sad was if you were to say, buy another times if you had messed up the puzzle first time!

[sadako]

I tried one, It made me want to commit seppuku. I tried but I accidentally committed bukkake

[bga]

iansull said:

the fiendish puzzles are the only ones i find difficult and today was the first day i finished a fiendish puzzle!

Me too! There's definately a knack to it.

[mcflurry]

So, who does it square by square? or is it easier number by number??

[WingChunDave]

My girlfriend is totally hooked. She only ever does the fiendish puzzles and manages them every time. I'd expect nothing less from a maths teacher.

[Raify]

There was an explanation by Ms Vorderman on how to do Sudoku, which has enabled me to finish difficult, but not the fiendish!
Basically you've got a few methods:


1st look at the rows and columns and see if there's any obvious 'gimmies' like
The columns on the left, leave only 1 place for a 2 in the bottom right box.
The rows at the top leave only 1 place for a 9 in the top left box. and so on...

2nd, look at rows and columns to further narrow down your choices..

A combination of those two methods are what I use. I'm sure there's some more fiendish methods!

[iansull]

I can do the fiendish puzzles.

You've got to tackle it as a whole puzzle not small bits. One area leads to another and so on.

Quite often you need to be thinking 4-5 moves ahead.

The thing i like about it is that the solution is there,somewhere. Every puzzle is solvable without guessing.Drives me nuts sometimes!!

The So Doku Samurai puzzle in saturdays Times is harder than any of the other puzzles

[r988]

iansull said:

The So Doku Samurai puzzle in saturdays Times is harder than any of the other puzzles

go that right, the rest are super easy, so much so that i rarely bother, but the times weekend fiendish are usually the only ones that trouble me and I've only been doing them for about a month, pretty easy once you've worked out a system (I thought I had a unique ingenious system until I found out that most other people already use the same method, Doh!) and once you have done a few you can usually work through them fairly quickly, easy takes about 5-10mins, about 15 for a medium and 20 for a hard, a fiendish can take anywhere from 30 mins to and hour depending on how tired I am and how hard it is