Dr. Sudoku Prescribes #57 – Isodoku
Theme: Missing my Rubik’s? This isodoku has 27 fewer “cubes” than Monday’s puzzle.
Rules: Standard Isodoku rules, using numbers 1-8.
Answer String: Enter the 1st “row” on the left edge, followed by a comma, followed by the 2nd “row” on the left edge.
Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 2:15, Master = 4:15, Expert = 8:30
Apropos of #55′s discussion, this one would *not* be mappable to a Sudo-Kurve, right?
Depends how loose you get with the design rules for Sudo-Kurves. I’ve tended to always keep regions intact and lines between regions — this would need lines between same region cells because of the 3 “cubes” at the bottom and UL and UR. I’d say it is mappable to Sudo-Kurve, but not in a trivial, useful, or beautiful way.
Because I am away from home at the moment and without printer support, I actually tried mapping this to a sudo-kurve using graph paper. I actually came up with a reasonably simple mapping for this one, but after going off the rails twice trying to solve it this way, I solved it in Windows paint instead.
With the benefit of the paint-assisted solution – and a few outer-ring-specific insights I was failing to see in the sudokurve-mapped version – I was then able to solve the mapped-to-sudokurve version successfully.
To sum up the above: it is probably possible to map all isodokus to sudokurves with enough general cussedness, but it is not likely to be worth the trouble.
13 : 33 s
Nice. A cube has been cut off from the middle .