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.