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The Miracle Sudoku [video]

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Re: The Miracle Sudoku [video]

#131

Post by acheron »

chris_st wrote: post #115
acheron wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first played Sherlock as a MS-DOS program in 1992 or so. Of his many variations on the theme, I like "Mrs. Hudson": http://www.kaser.com/mh.html

Thanks, "Mrs. Hudson" is interesting. Still think I like the original Sherlock the best...

The puzzles in the Sherlock series have a wide range in complexity. I've tried all of them I think and I ended up gravitating to Mrs Hudson the most but I can see why other people would have other favorites. I like several of the non-Sherlock logic games as well -- someone mentioned Willa's Walk earlier in the thread which is a good one.

There have been a few games showing up on Steam with similar deduction gameplay with more contemporary design styles. (There have actually been a lot of interface improvements to the Sherlock games over the years, but style-wise they basically look the same as they did when they first came to Windows in 1996 or whenever!) HexCells was a decent series (there were three games), though to a EKS/Sherlock veteran, the first game was ridiculously easy. The second and third had some good puzzles in them, but they were all handcrafted rather than procedurally generated. I couldn't figure out why there weren't random puzzles, and then the third game (HexCells Infinite) did have random generation, and it turned out that the answer was: because the random puzzles were garbage. Still, the handcrafted puzzles in the second and third games were nice for a bit, but compared with a game like Sherlock that you can continue playing random puzzles for practically ever, it seems like a bit of a short stick. There were a couple others I found on Steam that were similar, but I mostly get my logical deduction habits on with Mrs Hudson still.

Re: The Miracle Sudoku [video]

#132

Post by carapace »

nickysielicki wrote: post #129
carapace wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, "Boring Sudoku" a solver in Prolog w/ CLP(FD): https://swish.swi-prolog.org/p/Boring%20Sudoku.swinb - - - - I don't mean this in a critical way, just an observation. To me the video was boring because watching a human do machine work is frustrating (to me). (As fast and as clever as that fellow is, he's still so slow compared to a computer.) However, designing elegant constraint rules to encode the special cons…

That's cool, but that doesn't solve this puzzle. It's just a normal solver unless I'm missing something.

You're correct.

Adding constraints that encode the additional rules is also a little puzzle, eh?

I'll probably work on it later this evening for fun.

Re: The Miracle Sudoku [video]

#133

Post by yesbabyyes »

This was great fun! They have a new miracle sudoku[0] up since a couple of days, as well. Seeing him color the potential twos (aside from two wrongly colored squares) and then piece by piece ruling them out almost looked like a game of life, with new patterns emerging.

[0] https://youtu.be/Tv-48b-KuxI

Re: The Miracle Sudoku [video]

#134

Post by jgwil2 »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #91
jmiskovic wrote: post #12

The lightning speed of his observing standard rules across the board is impressive but expected after months of practice. The agility with which he picks up new rules and starts working with them is sign of a beautiful mind. This was a pleasure to watch.

It's really impressive to me how clearly he articulates what is going on in his head while solving.

Yes! Bet he would ace whiteboard interviews too.

Re: The Miracle Sudoku [video]

#135

Post by thom »

GreedCtrl wrote: post #122
thom wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess to me if still _feels_ a bit like brute force. You just go over all the squares and all the rules in a loop, adding and eliminating possible digits. There don't seem to be any sticking points where it's not clear how to make progress.

The "exploration and backtracking" you mention originally is the brute force method of solving sudoku by computer: recursive backtracking. If you want an example of sticking points, I'd recommend the Robin Hood sudoku: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdtWTg4LrqQ It can be brute forced with enough patience, but the fun for me comes in developing intuition on where to look next. The hints of a sudoku have meaning: they…

I guess the bit I'm missing is why the miracle sudoku (the two I can find) are special. As far as I can tell, they don't require any intuition at all, you just sit down and work through the rules that are right in front of you. Surely they're much easier than normal sudoku because of the extra rules? Are they noteworthy because of the construction of the puzzle, rather than the solving of it?

Re: The Miracle Sudoku [video]

#136

Post by imjasonmiller »

Hitton wrote: post #41
JackDrury wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which addon are you using for speedup?

Enhancer for YouTube can do that, but you can also do it with simple userscript. The userscript I found somewhere few years ago: // ==UserScript== // @name Mediabord // @version 01.1 // @description tryd to take over the world! // @author j // @match *://*/* // @grant metadata // ==/UserScript== document.addEventListener('keydown', function(event) { var vidz = document.querySelectorAll('video'); function is_text_box(…

This is great. The max being only two bothered me and I completely forgot that one could do that as well. I'm going to expand on the small script I wrote that sets the playback rate to twice the speed by default [1]. Thank you! :-)

1. https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/136744/233601

Re: The Miracle Sudoku [video]

#137

Post by natrys »

nickysielicki wrote: post #71

Here's a solver in python with z3: https://gist.github.com/sielicki/fd86d68733133f654128519b3c4... (note, most of the code coming from here, I just slopped together the additional constraints, https://ericpony.github.io/z3py-tutorial/guide-examples.htm ) $ time python3 game.py [[4, 8, 3, 7, 2, 6, 1, 5, 9], [7, 2, 6, 1, 5, 9, 4, 8, 3], [1, 5, 9, 4, 8, 3, 7, 2, 6], [8, 3, 7, 2, 6, 1, 5, 9, 4], [2, 6, 1, 5, 9, 4, 8, 3,…

I used Picat which provides a uniform API for many different flavour of solvers (e.g. smt module uses z3 underneath): https://gist.github.com/natrys/c19be79ac93578674540cdfa7a0df...

I get instantaneous answer with apparently zero backtrack with both SAT and SMT module. Though I don't know how reliable this statistics is.

Re: The Miracle Sudoku [video]

#138

Post by davidwparker »

JackDrury wrote: post #29
the_duke wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently started increasing playback speed on many videos I watch. It's really hard at first, but I quickly got used to it, to the point where I now use an addon to increase playback speed to 3-6x where appropriate. When there's something complicated, or something I want to enjoy and savior, I jump back and slow down. This is an incredible time saver. I got inspired to do this by observing a blind programmer use a…

which addon are you using for speedup?

I'm a big fan of this one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

Made by a Google employee. I use it all the time on Youtube, Netflix, Vimeo, etc.

Re: The Miracle Sudoku [video]

#139

Post by darekkay »

thom wrote: post #102
zwegner wrote: post #26

In case anybody sees this comment before the video: I'd highly recommend trying to solve the puzzle yourself. After you see the rules stated in the video, click the link in the info. It took me a bit longer than this guy, but it was a very fun puzzle.

I'd never done sudoku before and was a little disappointed to find it was so mechanistic. I'd sort of expected there to be some degree of exploration and backtracking, or perhaps having to solve multiple digits simultaneously while attempting to keep it all in your head. Is this puzzle representative of normal sudoku puzzles or do the additional constraints change it?

Check out a Hitori. It's kind of an "inverse Sudoku". More difficult puzzles always get to a point where you have to guess the state of a certain field and then backtrack if you were wrong.

Re: The Miracle Sudoku [video]

#140

Post by tasuki »

kadoban wrote: post #127
tasuki wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey I made a website with books full of go problems. It's become quite popular: https://tsumego.tasuki.org/ It's non-interactive not just because I'm lazy, but also there's some reasoning for why you should solve problems rather than click around and randomly try things out :)

Thanks for your site! I've been there before. I really like the Cho problems.

Cho Chikun is the popular one. My favourite is Gokyo Shumyo!
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