Saturday, April 15, 2006
Clueless
I recently discovered Sudoku puzzles, and they have me stumped. I'm no genius at puzzles, but I was attracted to Sudoku because it seemed orderly and logical, easily (though not necessarily quickly) solved by the process of elimination. But I can't get any further than the obvious eliminations. While doing a puzzle in the newspaper, it seemed sensible to jot down little numbers in pencil to indicate which numbers COULD go in each square, and erase them later, and I was delighted to find that the online Sudoku puzzles actually allow you to do the same thing electronically. Still, once I've settled on a few numbers that display only one possibility, I can't get past the many others that seem to have multiple possibilities. Surely one is not intended to fill out the rest using mainly guesswork? It seems to me that it must be a more orderly puzzle than that, and I'm just not getting it.
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You're right, it's completely orderly and logical (or that's what we're told, at least). I've recently become fascinated with Soduko, too, mainly because all of a sudden it seemed to be everywhere without my ever having heard of it before.
You've got to find broader limiters to keep going on a puzzle. As an example which seems very unlikely but is easy to understand, say that you've got a puzzle with only the top two lines of the upper right square filled in. For our purposes, let's say those numbers are 1, 2, 3 on the top line and 4, 5, 6 on the second. That means 7, 8, 9 must fill in the bottom three blanks. Looking at the upper middle and upper left boxes, you might say 7, 8, 9 could fit in any of the nine blanks in either box because there are no conflicts. You know, however, that they have to be somewhere in the bottom line of the upper right box, so you can eliminate them as possibilities for bottom lines of the other two boxes. Even though you haven't filled in a 7, 8, or 9 in any blank on the board at all, you already know that there are six blanks in which they cannot fit.
The more difficult Sudokus demand you to take these logical leaps that are present but certainly not obvious. The more you practice, the more you learn to look for these unobtrusive limiters. (Sorry for bloviating at such length.)
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