Thanks again! Nice easy puzzle today.

Another easy puzzle. This one took me 7:48. Finding the hidden singles definitely helped.

This was a quick (for me) and straightforward solve as well. I take a middle ground on the question of corner-marking and center-marking. I'm in the habit of brute-force corner-marking first, because I enjoy the routine of it. As a programmer, I'm as enamored by heuristics and algorithms that are reliable. I don't see how this causes any trouble with even very hard classic Sudokus. I then center-mark, starting with the most restricted houses and moving towards the least restrictive. I'm better at seeing patterns in the resulting groups of center-marks then I am at keeping those same digits in my head. I'm reminded of a favorite aphorism of mine -- "Confucius say 'most pale ink better than best memory'". This might also be a result of my aging brain (I'm 71). I'm not interested in the many variants, so that doesn't concern me. I find that even for the most diabolical classic Sudokus, staring at pencil marks lets me see patterns that otherwise escape me. One thing I do for very difficult classic Sudokus that is seldom needed for these daily "hard" NYT puzzles is to use a color (I use red) and mark each of the cells that can contain a specific number. I traverse those from 1 to 9, looking for patterns in the resulting colored cells. I find it easier to see the various "wings" and "fish" (as well as "finned" variations and skyscrapers) this way. This also reveals any missing naked singles that otherwise escape me. This is, of course, much slower than your approach. Since I'm not interested in competing for time (I feel enough time pressure from my day-job of programming), I prefer to go more slowly knowing that I almost always eventually get there in the end. I always enjoy your daily solve. I've learned over several decades of programming in teams that celebrating different "thinking styles" nearly always leads to more effective teams. I love being on a team with some members who intuitively see an answer in a flash alongside others who are thrive on slogging through reams of data to find a single key item. The latter is particularly helpful when chasing down things like bugs in assemblers, compilers, and code generators. Those are often hard to find because they look "right" and -- when there's a bug -- occasionally are not.

@Rangsk

3 ай бұрын

Thank you for your insight and perspective!

Very easy sudoku

Got held up with spotting the 67 pair in row five to clear up, but other than that it went smoothly

Got it in 5:31 today which was real quick for me

kind comment