Sudoku Players' Forum (clone)

Thanks, udosuk, for the tips. I am a pure pencil-and-paper man myself, and even then only rarely using pencilmarks, but I will get in a stock of exercise books.

udosuk pointed out that I had missed a possibility.

For completeness, click three times to see what I wrote:

The bottom line is 26135~4

The balance of the 10 cannot be 63 as I have used up the 6s in c23 (once 56 is inserted in r2c23).

If it is 25, I have

000000
056000
000500
500600
625100
26134~5

And moving onwards forces

000000
056000
003503
534612
62513~4
26134~5 with two 3s in r3 ERROR


The balance of the 10 is therefore 45iso

Great, thanks for clearing that up.

So you agree the difficulty is too high for a printed puzzle on newspaper?

Sorry, but no.

This was originally 'done' in real time in about 20 minutes, with just the puzzle and a pencil. Perhaps a bit like chess, I 'see' things that are not going to work without having to laboriously write them out, so I do not need to go down those routes. I do not think I am alone in this.

Of course, it is possible to object to the absence of a pure step-by-step logical progression to an answer, but life is too short. It is just a puzzle to do on the train on the way to work.

Okay, points taken.

I assume my problem was I tried to use the standard of Pappocom Sudoku puzzles to assess the logical solvability of these puzzles. If we accept short T&E approaches (e.g. Nishio) then there shouldn't be too much strife on these. Generally a lot of Japanese puzzles (e.g. Nikoli) need short T&E approaches to solve and with the size of these puzzles (6x6) the logic involved shouldn't have been too straight forward.

Those KenKen providers must have been listening in to our discussions here because since the last couple of weeks many of the daily KenKen puzzles (especially the difficult ones) either have multiple solutions or are diabolically difficult to solve without operators. I think I need to give up the practice of trying to solve every Times KenKen the No-Op way.