dailysudoku.com

[AZ Matt]

Do clues have to be symetrical

[David Bryant]

No, the clues don't have to be symmetrical. See some of the 17-clue sudokus at Gordon Royle's web site for examples.

Most published puzzles do exhibit rotational symmetry (1/2 rotation). I think that's been copied from crossword puzzles, which wouldn't have to be symmetrical, but almost always are.

Now, who is Hanlon? I guess he's not paranoid ... dcb

[someone_somewhere]

Hi David,

Here some nice info from Wikipedia about Hanlon's Razor:

Hanlon's Razor, a corollary of Finagle's law (see also Murphy's law) and/or Occam's Razor, reads:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
The term's derivation is unknown. A similar epigram has been attributed to William James among others. According to Joseph Bigler the quote first came from someone named Robert J. Hanlon as a submission for a book compilation of various jokes related to Murphy's law.

A similar quote appears in Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 short story Logic of Empire ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"), so some claim Hanlon's Razor is a corruption of "Heinlein's Razor."

The aphorism is also widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Observations on the sway of human error over malice occur in various works. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) mentions "...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent."

Hanlon's Razor is a favorite of hackers, often showing up in sig blocks, fortune files, and the login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks.

Stupidity seems to be the default answer. As the late Frank Zappa observed, "There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."

P.S. I think that that's relevant for Sudoku

see u,

[AZ Matt]