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Starting the year off with a potentially bad addiction...

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My wife gave me a sudoku puzzle book (editted by Will Shortz, one of the easy to hard volumes).  I knew about the game, but I never tried to solve a puzzle nor bothered to learn the rules.  Good thing I wasn't aware of this game during high school, otherwise I would have been in serious trouble ;). Anyways, to put things lightly, a lot of my free time has been spent solving sudoku puzzles. 

I find the puzzles fun to solve on two levels.  First, I like the pure logic of it.  It is fun to deduce directly or indirectly what a certain square's value should be.  Second, I enjoy that you have to keep multiple possibilities in your head at the same time. I find the process very close to debugging ;); I have to keep track of multiple threads in my head and identify what data they are operating on, just like the multiple possibilities for each square.  It never occurred to me that a puzzle that mimic that thought process.

Hopefully I don't lose too much sleep over it ;).  Have a happy new year and thanks for reading.  More content tomorrow....

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 08, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2007
    Friendly tip if you are enjoying Sudoku... don't get a software version and turn on "pencilmarking" (i.e. where it automatically lightly fills in the numbers that are legally possible on each square). Turns out that all but the most ludicrously difficult Sudoku problems are trivial, though tedious, exercises in bookkeeping. As long as you don't experience it yourself, you can easily dismiss my claim and still enjoy it, though... so welcome to a new addiction :-).

  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2007
    The penciling feature (when using paper at least) is a good visualization tool for me to be able to narrow down the bookkeeping/possibilites for a series of boxes.  I haven't looked at the online tools, but i would love one that lets you work on a puzzle and have the following undo/redo stack push a partially saved puzzle that I could restore to

  • al the std features I think I might try to make this my first WPF project just to play around ;) d
  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2007
    Wow, holy college days  Batman.  This was one of my programming lessons in CompSci.  Teaching array boundaries and nested looping. :)