dailysudoku.com

keith · Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 11:49 pm Post subject: How do YOU use Draw/Play?

I am interested in how people use Draw/Play on the main page of the Daily Sudoku site. Please describe your use cases.

Personally, I use it for two reasons:

1. To print puzzles that I then solve on paper.

2. To generate message code that makes it easier for others to access puzzles I post. This is the ASCII function. (There is a "How To" on this, I believe.)

I do not use Draw/Play to solve puzzles or to get hints.

How about you?

Keith

CORUJA · Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2015 12:42 pm Post subject: Re: How do YOU use Draw/Play?

Hi Keith,
I use Draw/Play to solve the very hard puzzles.

alanr555 · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2015 8:32 am Post subject:

I can go months without using DS at all but recently I cam back to it
when I encountered some published grids that seemed not to be
resolvable (separate topic). Use of D/P enabled me to confirm (in most
cases!) that I had identified as much as D/P could up to the point of the
"Too Hard" warning issued when requesting a hint too far. This enabled
me to challenge the publication rather than my own approach.

Normally I would seldom use the "Hint" facility but it has proved very
valuable in that recent context. However there are occasional messages
to the effect that there is an inability to explain some hints. Does this
involve a "psychic" approach??

Clearly not! Either there is an underlying logic or the solver has resorted
to a "trial and error" approach. As the latter is unlikely, the probability
would seem that there is a linguistic difficulty with providing a concise
set of words describing the logic.

Perhaps the solution is to have a glossary of "complex hints" with some
appropriate labels - so that the Hint message line can refer directly to
"technique A1" or whatever and then the user can attempt to see what
logic has been applied.

The messages already require the user to do some work when such
phrases as "line/box interaction" are used - but at least the user (or
player in this case) has a clue as to where to look.

DS has some really useful features and this is by no means to taken
as a criticism. After ten years plus most of the basics have been
addressed (I recall some of the discussion in the early days) and so
there is an opportunity to delve more on specific issues rather than
just aiming for an overall workable product. This topic that is called
"explanation" could still be a candidate for attention.

In Friendship
Alan

nataraj · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2015 2:38 pm Post subject:

nataraj · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2015 2:55 pm Post subject:

Could not find the story about the Oxford scientists. But this one is about the same theme:

"Service Call", published 1954. I found it in vol.4 of the Collected Stories, titled "The Days of Perky Pat".

Helmut