dailysudoku.com

[samgj]

G'day all

I've had interesting email conversation about possible differences in brains attacking Sudokus made of numbers and letters. The kids section has an advertised feature of allowing printouts to use letters instead of numbers. As a side effect, you can also get lettered adult puzzles:

http://www.dailysudoku.co.uk/cgi-bin/sudoku/get_pdf.pl?today=1&letters=1

Thought it might be interesting to start a discussion about whether anyone finds letters easier than numbers.

Sam

[chelsea]

The new "TV Guide" in the U.S. offers a crossword puzzle and a Sudoku-type puzzle, but it's off-putting because you have to remember the 9 alphabet letters that are used every week.
I can remember "1 through 9", but it's tougher to remember "a,b,c, l, x, g, e, f, y, and i."
Your brain can easily handle 123456789, but it's tougher to process ABCLXDGEFYIX. There is a natural MISSING number -- if I see 1235, I KNOW 4 is missing. If I see ABLX, I don't intuitively KNOW "n" is missing.
Our brains see a missing number, but in random letters, tougher.