[casual_games] Sudoku difficulty

[spocilujko at comcast.net]

Check out websudoku.com and their difficulty levels...

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Robert Gordon <rob at article19.com>
> Hey Charles - I'll bite.
> 
> I created this:
> http://dailysudoku.shockwave.com
> 
> There's quite a bit of discussion out there on the right way to think about
> this issue. One of the more interesting (and inspirational) solutions comes
> from the developer of the Sudoku Susser (Google it). There are essentially
> two ways to go about grading puzzles - one is to compare brute-force search
> times across puzzles, the other is to employ progressively more
> sophisticated human-logic solving techniques. My preference is for the
> latter, and many seem to feel that this gives a more realistic rating.
> There's a lot of information out there describing the techniques and I've
> managed to code for 7 of them so far (more than enough to handle out
> puzzles).
> 
> Now - that doesn't really speak to the generation issue. Generating 'good'
> puzzles can be a very challenging task (apparently Gould from Sudoku.com
> spent years perfecting his program). One strategy is get together a program
> that simply spits out MANY valid and single-solution puzzles, then run them
> through a rating algo to find the 'good' ones.
> 
> r o b
> 
> 
> | Robert Gordon
> | The Article 19 Group Inc.
> | phone: 514.938.8512
> | email: rob at article19.com
> | http://www.article19.com
> 
> 
> > From: Charles Parcell <cparcell at toxictoy.com>
> > Reply-To: cparcell at toxictoy.com, IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
> > <casual_games at igda.org>
> > Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 17:24:57 -0500
> > To: casual_games at igda.org
> > Subject: [casual_games] Sudoku difficulty
> > 
> > This actually is spawning from another list I am on where we are talking
> > about Sudoku puzzles. the question has been posed, how do you rank a
> > Sudoku puzzle as simple, or difficult?
> > 
> > We are discussing generators. The approach has been to generate a solved
> > puzzle first and then remove numbers from there. In this removal process
> > it is assumed that different formulas would be applied to generate an
> > simple or difficult puzzle. There are two thoughts going on around this.
> > First is the number of empty locations within a puzzle. The second
> > thought is the number of start points for solving and "chaining" solutions.
> > 
> > Since this is a casual game list and Sudoku is a casual game... I assume
> > that this is not an inappropriate e-mail.
> > 
> > Charles P.
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Casual_Games mailing list
> > Casual_Games at igda.org
> > http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/casual_games
> > 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Casual_Games mailing list
> Casual_Games at igda.org
> http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/casual_games