dailysudoku.com

[nataraj]

This is the season of cold overcast afternoons, drizzle and snow ... a good time to spend an afternoon inside, by the fire, with some hot chocolate and some cookies, maybe.

And ...

a bunch of Sudokus, of course.

No "advanced", or "impossible", this time. Nice and hard, and of various types: "classic" (VH), "squiggly", "X-Sudoku" and "Color".

I find myself not doing "Advanced" any more, it seems I prefer the squiggly and color - they seem to actually present even more challenge to my brain:
finding those pairs and triples and "box" / line interactions even when the grid is distorted (as in squigglies) or contains additional houses (colors), which makes the familiar patterns much harder to spot.

Doing the color sudokus, I found an extension to my previous method of solving sudokus, which I'd like to share with you:

1. sweep the floors and dust the towers as usual
2. do the same for color/row and color/column interactions (rows 1,4,7 - if two of these rows contain the same candidate, say "2" in hues "beige" and "blue", then in the third row, "2" must be in one of the "pink" cells)
3. to remember box/line interactions, I use "potential marks" in the upper right corner of the grid cells, now to remember color/line interactions I write down potential marks in the upper left corner.
4. Look at all the colors and write down, which candidates are already solved, like this:
hue 1: 12.4.6..9
hue 2: ..345..89
I always fill those color houses first that have 4 or more solved cells.
Then fill the other houses (row, column, box)

So, with color Sudoku (and to a much lesser extent with X-Sudoku), the pleasure in solving them comes from the fact that there are now four house types with new interactions (color/row, color/column, box/diagonal etc.) that help a lot ...

Enjoy !

2011 Winter Special