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PostPosted: Wed May 07, 2008 1:21 am 
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I'm beginning to think that I'm in the minority, but here goes:

I'm strictly a pencil-and-paper sudokuist. I use sudoku software for three things:

1. Help me manage my (rather extensive) sudoku collection (including calculating a standardized difficulty rating)

2. Calculate pencil marks (this is sheer tedium to me, takes the fun out of sudoku, and I make too many stupid mistakes before I ever start to solve the puzzle)

3. Print my puzzles so I can work on them (especially away from home or in bed before I go to sleep)

I couldn't care less about fancy graphics and all that. I really don't even care very much about having the program generate puzzles for me--I can find enough puzzles on various Web sites to take care of that (besides, I lkie seeing and comparing puzzles from a lot of different sources). I certainly don't need for it to help me solve puzzles or keep track of my moves.

So, that being said, here's what I like:

1. I like the numerical rating system of Ruud's Sudocue. It makes for much more precise differentiation than a half-dozen rating descriptions.

2. I like the fact that Ruud's Sudocue and Sadman Sudoku can import many different semistandard puzzle formats (.SDK, .SDM, etc.), including puzzle collection files.

3. I like Sadman Sudoku's ability to print puzzles of MY choice four to a page, and then print a page of those puzzles' solutions.

4. I like the feature of Richard's SudokuSolver that calculates pencil marks for multi-grid puzzles, especialy those in the overlapping blocks. I just wish it would do so in a single step (instead of one given at a time), and I wish I could store it in a format readable by Sudocue and Sadman Sudoku.

5. I like the ability of Sudocue to print individual puzzles in full-page size. My only complaint there is that it doesn't print row and column numbers. Ruud was going fix that, but. . .


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PostPosted: Tue May 13, 2008 8:35 am 
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Hi "enxio27",

You've raised some good points here. No-one's responded yet, so thought I'd give my two cents worth...

enxio27 wrote:
I'm strictly a pencil-and-paper sudokuist.

Love the term sudokuist! Is that the official term? Nice to officially find out what I am after a nearly a couple of years! :)

enxio27 wrote:
I use sudoku software for three things...
...
2. Calculate pencil marks (this is sheer tedium to me, takes the fun out of sudoku, and I make too many stupid mistakes before I ever start to solve the puzzle)

I presume (from your above comment about being a paper sudokuist) that you mean the initial pencil marks, and that once you've printed the puzzle (including pencil marks) you don't go back to the software to recalculate them again. Am I correct here?

enxio27 wrote:
I couldn't care less about fancy graphics and all that.

I know what you mean, but I personally very much appreciate the work that Richard has put in on SudokuSolver (SS) to allow a background image and customize the colors, as well as highlight regions, cells and individual candidates. The former makes the puzzle more visually appealing (less boring) when posted, and the latter allows for good tutorial-style posts (even if none have been posted as of yet :-()

enxio27 wrote:
I really don't even care very much about having the program generate puzzles for me

I rely on software for puzzle generation. My attitude is, however, that the solver doesn't need to implement every technique under the sun, but only needs to screen for the basic/intermediate techniques. I leave finding advanced techniques to the manual solver. That's part of the fun for me.

enxio27 wrote:
I certainly don't need for it to help me solve puzzles or keep track of my moves.

I think it's fun to do sudokus on paper, although some things are tedious to do by hand, like adding up all the cages to calculate the sum of innies and outies in Killer Sudoku (often only to find out that the result is unusable anyway!), for example. Talking about Assassins, these puzzles are usually too difficult to do on paper (unless you're prepared to use a T&E-like approach), so use of software as a puzzle editor (rather than solver) is essential, as is saving the state in order to work on the puzzle later. One other very useful feature that I think is within the bounds acceptability for manual solving is for software to highlight the cells containing a specified candidate digit. However, anything beyond that (such as highlighting hidden/naked singles, strong links, etc.) is probably going too far, because a manual solver should be able to work this out for himself/herself from the highlighted digit distribution.

enxio27 wrote:
1. I like the numerical rating system of Ruud's Sudocue. It makes for much more precise differentiation than a half-dozen rating descriptions.

Is that an indirect reference to the somewhat subjective rating system we use for Assassins? This was IMO originally designed to calibrate SudokuSolver's SScore. Ideally, it would be nice for the SScore to take over some day, although manual solvers will still need to show the red card, especially in cases where the calculated SScore seems way off. The only problem I see is that the rating system used by SS is not transparent. Exactly what the moves are that are involved, and how they contribute to the rating is not currently documented.

enxio27 wrote:
2. I like the fact that Ruud's Sudocue and Sadman Sudoku can import many different semistandard puzzle formats (.SDK, .SDM, etc.), including puzzle collection files.

It would of course be nice to have real portable standards (e.g., XML-based?) for Sudoku data interchange instead of everyone doing their own thing. BTW, is Sadman Sudoku (or even SudoCue for that matter) still being developed?

It would be interesting to hear what other people's opinions are on these topics.

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Mike


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PostPosted: Tue May 13, 2008 8:51 am 
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P.S. The above post of mine is concerned with manual solving. In case anyone gets the wrong idea, I just want to stress that implementing functionality that goes way beyond that (e.g., in JSudoku and SudokuSolver) still very much has its place in other usage scenarios (e.g. for learning, finding out what one missed, and so on). Indeed, I rely on both of these fine tools for puzzle evaluation during my Killer creation process. But of course there's also plenty of room for new software that concentrates mainly on the manual solving process, too.

BTW, it would IMO be great to have some good sudoku editing S/W for Windows CE handhelds, as this would combine the portability of doing puzzles on paper with the advantages (e.g. digit highlighting, keeping track of candidates, etc.) of electronic editors. I have a dream...

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PostPosted: Thu May 15, 2008 5:08 am 
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mhparker wrote:
Love the term sudokuist! Is that the official term? Nice to officially find out what I am after a nearly a couple of years! :)

Well, I can't claim originality--I saw it on one of the sudoku forums somewhere, but I have no recollection now which one it was. I'm glad you like it though--it seems to me to be a particularly appropriate term.

mhparker wrote:
I presume (from your above comment about being a paper sudokuist) that you mean the initial pencil marks, and that once you've printed the puzzle (including pencil marks) you don't go back to the software to recalculate them again. Am I correct here?

Correct. I generally don't print pencil marks for standard 9x9 puzzles (yet--I may once I get to more difficult ones), but I do print them for all of the multi-grid puzzles. As I solve the puzzle, I mark out the candidates I've ruled out.

mhparker wrote:
I know what you mean, but I personally very much appreciate the work that Richard has put in on SudokuSolver (SS) to allow a background image and customize the colors, as well as highlight regions, cells and individual candidates.

Agreed, but I simply don't use those features. Obviously there are many who do, so I, too, appreciate Richard's work on their behalf.

mhparker wrote:
I think it's fun to do sudokus on paper, although some things are tedious to do by hand, like adding up all the cages to calculate the sum of innies and outies in Killer Sudoku (often only to find out that the result is unusable anyway!), for example. Talking about Assassins, these puzzles are usually too difficult to do on paper (unless you're prepared to use a T&E-like approach),

Oh, I don't even do Killer, Jigsaw, or any of those. For some reason, those just don't interest me. Combining math with sudoku is too much like work to me.

I like the Sudoku-X and Windoku, as well as the multi-grid standard sudoku such as Clueless, Samurai, Shogun, etc. (including X variations), but other than those, the most esoteric I've gotten is 16x16 (mostly from uclick.com). However, I have yet to find a software program that will calculate pencil marks for those (I quit doing 16x16 when I got tired of doing pencil marks myself and making too many pencil-mark mistakes for it to be fun).

mhparker wrote:
enxio27 wrote:
1. I like the numerical rating system of Ruud's Sudocue. It makes for much more precise differentiation than a half-dozen rating descriptions.

Is that an indirect reference to the somewhat subjective rating system we use for Assassins?

Not really, since I don't do Assassins and am completely unfamiliar with rating systems for those. I just see so many different terms used to describe puzzle difficulty in the various Web sites, software, etc., most of which are subjective to varying extents, and no real way to correlate among them. Sudocue's numerical score gives me a more objective, standardized rating system for puzzles of any source.

mhparker wrote:
It would of course be nice to have real portable standards (e.g., XML-based?) for Sudoku data interchange instead of everyone doing their own thing.

The single-line, 81-character format seems to be the most widely accepted, although there are others (the file formats page on the Sudocue site is a good start). I've seen a few XML-based formats, but they're very verbose and completely unstandardized. The 81-character format is by far the most compact, and lends itself very easily to multi-grid and puzzle collection formats.

mhparker wrote:
BTW, is Sadman Sudoku (or even SudoCue for that matter) still being developed?

I'm in contact (via email) with Simon Armstrong every now and then, and he appears to be still working on Sadman Sudoku. The latest version was released in December of last year, and he's working on another, as yet unreleased version (incidentally implementing a few of the things I've asked for). Sudocue was still being developed late last year, but Ruud seems to have disappeared off of the sudoku radar since about mid-January.


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