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swehFor Christmas, as a "stocking gift", I was given one of those small books with 200 sudoku puzzles in them. Before then I'd played a little with them but not really got into it.
So over the past few weeks I've been doing the puzzles during my idle times. I've done 163 of them. And... I must be missing something. There's an elegance which is lacking. I'm not sure if I can explain "elegance" in this context; it's just a feeling I have when solving problems... the elegant solution is frequently the one which exposes an underlying feature of the problem and makes it more amenable to efficient solving. Maybe that's the mathematician in my speaking :-)
Anyway, most of the time I can reduce a sudoku to hinging on finding the one number which then causes a cascade which allows the rest to be filled in. And that one number is found by trial and error; looking at combinations of squares, resolving conflicts, putting tentative results ("a 7 must be here or here so that means that row has a 7 between the two....") and... really it feels too much like guesswork.
Obviously I can solve them; I've done 163. But... there's no elegance to the solution. It feels too much like brute-forcing the problem.
So I skipped ahead to the last puzzle, which is meant to be the hardest. And... no matter how hard I look, I can't find the missing piece. I'm now reduced to "what if" scenarios; what if this has a 2, follow the cascade... find it leads to conflict. Therefore that can't be a 2. That's worse that lacking elegance; that's terrible, bletcherous, offensive.
So the conclusion I come to is that either sudokos are inherently inelegant or else I'm missing the key to make it beautiful (and that lack of key is causing me to follow disgusting methods).
Because I was failing to see beauty in my solutions, I finally gave up and threw the book away. The remaining 37 puzzles can be left unsolved. (If I didn't throw it away then it'd nag at me... "unsolved problems! Must solve!")
Ah well.
So over the past few weeks I've been doing the puzzles during my idle times. I've done 163 of them. And... I must be missing something. There's an elegance which is lacking. I'm not sure if I can explain "elegance" in this context; it's just a feeling I have when solving problems... the elegant solution is frequently the one which exposes an underlying feature of the problem and makes it more amenable to efficient solving. Maybe that's the mathematician in my speaking :-)
Anyway, most of the time I can reduce a sudoku to hinging on finding the one number which then causes a cascade which allows the rest to be filled in. And that one number is found by trial and error; looking at combinations of squares, resolving conflicts, putting tentative results ("a 7 must be here or here so that means that row has a 7 between the two....") and... really it feels too much like guesswork.
Obviously I can solve them; I've done 163. But... there's no elegance to the solution. It feels too much like brute-forcing the problem.
So I skipped ahead to the last puzzle, which is meant to be the hardest. And... no matter how hard I look, I can't find the missing piece. I'm now reduced to "what if" scenarios; what if this has a 2, follow the cascade... find it leads to conflict. Therefore that can't be a 2. That's worse that lacking elegance; that's terrible, bletcherous, offensive.
So the conclusion I come to is that either sudokos are inherently inelegant or else I'm missing the key to make it beautiful (and that lack of key is causing me to follow disgusting methods).
Because I was failing to see beauty in my solutions, I finally gave up and threw the book away. The remaining 37 puzzles can be left unsolved. (If I didn't throw it away then it'd nag at me... "unsolved problems! Must solve!")
Ah well.
