Thursday, May 06, 2010

Increased Degree of Difficulty

The 5th Annual World Sudoku Championships were held last weekend in Philadelphia. I have no idea who won; I doubt the name would mean anything to me anyway.

What did blow my mind, however, was the PDF of the Puzzles Example Booklet that they put up online. It's 21 pages of increasingly outrageous Sudoku variants that makes the mind buckle just to contemplate -- never mind trying to actually solve one.

There's "Integer Division" Sudoku, where numbers on the line between two cells indicate the result you get when you divide the large number of the two by the smaller.

Hexagon Sudoku, where the cells are all hexagons, and you must place your 9 numbers so they don't repeat in any of the three directions.

Musketry Sudoku: five overlapping grids, each of which obeys their own rules while simultaneously interacting with the others.

Trinary Sudoku, in which all the 9 numbers are presented in base 3 -- clues for numbers may give you only one of the two digits IN the number that belongs in the cell.

And that's only about 2/3rd of the way through an ever-more-difficult booklet. It makes my brain hurt.

1 comment:

Major Rakal said...

The standard Sudoku is plenty for me. I've tried a couple of very mild variants and can't get my head around them. I don't even want to contemplate Sudoku in base 3... I do Sudoku for fun.

Oddly enough, my CAPTCHA for this post is "unfunarc".