Børge wrote:
I will try to generate a symmetric puzzle for next week,
Cool! Thanks!
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Personally I do not understand why people have a penchant for symmetrical puzzles
Pure aesthetics, I guess. I love patterns and order, always have. I maintain that's a key reason for my reading ability and math ability at a young age.
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or puzzles where overlapping blocks are clueless.
Now that I've never heard, nor do I understand why anyone would insist on this. I agree--it makes no difference in the difficulty of the puzzle.
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Take a look at
http://www.fiendishsudoku.com. Every day they have five sudokus with the difficulty ratings Easy, Moderate, Hard, Evil and Fiendish. What so special is that each day all five sudokus have the exact same layout, or pattern if you prefer (and therefore also the exact same number of givens). Solely the values of the givens determine the difficulty of each sudoku.
And they have some really pretty patterns!
Incidentally, I find it difficult to believe that the puzzles on those sites (
http://www.fiendishsudoku.com and its sister sites,
http://www.extremesudoku.info and
http://www.samurai-sudoku.com) are generated strictly by hand, especially ten standard sudoku (in ten different difficulty levels) and a samurai EVERY DAY. I think it more likely that the patterns are created by hand, and then the puzzles are computer-generated to fit the selected pattern.