This video will talk about our early history with GAS team, where we reached 50 published posts on Saturday, a great milestone for us. On the 51st puzzle (shown) something much different happened when I decided to start solving. What is it, and how do I express / unlock creativity at different times?
Join us every day around 8:45 AM PT to learn about yesterday’s puzzles on the site, other sudoku news, and get a teaser for the new puzzle.
To hate a thing, you have to love a thing. To hate a thing, you have to love a thing. That sounds like yesterday’s theme. This video is not about repetitive computer-generated slop, but it is about repetition. Rather accidental or purposeful, there is sometimes replication of puzzles when authoring or editing. Listen to a fun story that makes us ask how certain things happen and then even forces to ask, when we are choosing a grid like a 17-given one that must be repetition if there is still a way to represent it that is something new and not just déjà vu.
We’ll also reveal the first 2 minutes of the most important Snyder Sudoku Method of construction that we don’t think anyone has done.
Join us again tomorrow around 8:45 AM PT every day to learn about yesterday’s puzzles on the site, other sudoku news, and get a teaser for the new puzzle.
To hate a thing, you have to love a thing. Keep this in mind as you watch this raw video that may venture into delicate spaces but gets at what is important not just about puzzles, but about puzzle publishing, and there is a lot of scar tissue from long before the AI-hype cycle. Based on actions during the video, we suspect at least 98.4375% of slop may eventually be harmed by this video.
Join us again tomorrow around 8:45 AM PT every day to learn about yesterday’s puzzles on the site, other sudoku news, and get a teaser for the new puzzle.
Welcome to the second episode of Today in Sudoku, where we’ll talk about challenges in notation and (BREAKING NEWS!) reveal a new kind of Snyder Notation for outside the box thinking.
Join us again tomorrow around 8:45 AM PT to learn about yesterday’s puzzle more, get other sudoku news, and get a teaser for the new puzzle.
We’re premiering a new Daily YouTube video series (Today in Sudoku) to help explain our Sudoku content, highlight other projects and news, and we’re going to release it daily around 8:45 AM so it can include a teaser for the upcoming puzzle and be a place we gather before solving that. Today it is ok if no one is here and watching on time. We are starting to do things, and find the roles we need to hire, so we can have “The Most Important Sudoku” every day at one place at one time, which is what a daily puzzle needs to have to be most valuable as a daily puzzle. The audience will be here eventually. We already have the best Genuinely Approachable (Variant) Sudoku and we are moving towards the same for Classics.
This does not replace “This Month in Sudoku” which is for longer themes and when we let Thomas have unscripted sections to say more big picture summaries and connect dots where people haven’t seen things. We are still planning the exact date for the second episode of that.
We wanted to share a “the story so far” kind of update for “A Story of Self-setting Sudoku” since a lot of people have not been following very deeply. Importantly, if you just like solving really elegant Sudoku puzzles, please just solve the Sudoku. You can ignore the author, title, and flavor text; the provided difficulties suggest what you’ll be getting on any post. However, the posts do link together so…
For the light summary (web view only):
In the first week, Thomas shared a set of 4 (of 5) puzzles on a box-like grid, titled “Intelligence is Thinking * The Box” which each had very different solving structures. The flavor text suggested some may have been hand-set but by the end he was possibly enjoying time at the beach and a computer was doing most of the work. While getting to full self-setting AI was problematic, adding in new training sources besides just Classic Sudoku got some more curious puzzles and better AI. Finally, on Monday, the “Dr. Sudoku” system launched on its own, exceeding the typical 9×9 space of a sudoku puzzle.
We’ve been told that each week (roughly) there will be a new theme for the Sudoku, and this is now the second day for an apparent “self-driving” theme. The puzzles seem easier so far — at least today’s only needs 1-6 placed — but who knows what is down the road.
For the heavy summary (web and discord rabbithole):
Besides the story above, the president of GMPuzzles, mars, has been using their own HAL 12000 AI system to analyze and solve the puzzles. They have been finding occasional traces of puzzle hunt-like signals in the sudoku, and with the help of Tane, HAL was able to hack into the Dr. Sudoku system but has since gone quiet.
We await further word, but this might be a battle of intelligence against intelligence. We’ll need help eventually. There is a spoiler-free place in the Discord just for the HAL 12000 messages and a cooperative discussion space. But first you may have to join.
Summary and Schedule:
Starting tomorrow, we are going to return to having daily posts here, focused on Sudoku. This will begin with content prepared for the first-ever SudokuCon in Boston and then expand out in other ways as we explore some different opportunities in this remarkable number placement genre.
Over three weeks we will have ~40 Just One Cell Sudoku puzzles prepared for a competition at SudokuCon that was organized by Clover and Thomas Snyder, with at least two “puzzles” a day:
On May 25th, we’ll also have a link to a 2.5+ hour video on “How to Solve Sudoku Like a World Champion”. Here is a summary for this curious and entertaining talk:
After that, we have additional ideas to continue to showcase the best that Sudoku has to offer, including more than just puzzles. Sudoku will stay our focus for awhile here on the blog as we continue to work with our partners on other logic puzzles.
A message from Thomas (Dr. Sudoku):
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After twelve years and over three thousand puzzles worth of free entertainment, the GMPuzzles team has made the hard decision to bring the “blog era” of this site to a close. Despite many attempts through the years, we have not been able to make either the community or the business model work in a blog format to unlock the best from our puzzles. There might still be some posts here from time to time with bonus puzzles, and we intend to maintain this website indefinitely given the incredible library of puzzles here. But there should be no expectation of new “daily content” again in the future.
For 2025, GMPuzzles will focus on several of our partner projects bringing daily puzzles to hundreds of thousands of solvers on other platforms. We will also explore alternate ways to package our content for new audiences. In future years, we might find ways to radically redesign this website and launch a new puzzle platform, but our current ambitions are mostly to be the world’s best puzzle designers and to publish through other platforms where they work for our goals.
While our founder, Thomas Snyder, found an unusual way to say goodbye, he hopes the spirit of beautiful puzzles and pushing the limits of sudoku and other puzzle construction continue in those who were drawn to the site. Thomas will be starting a new place for his own blogging, and we the team echo his thoughts that it has been a great 12 years and we’re still excited for the future of Grandmaster Puzzles in whatever shape that takes.
Thanks to all who have been fans, and we hope you run into our puzzles again in the future.