Announcing: The Twelve Days of Sudoku
Early reviews that chatGPT was probably prompted enough times to finally hallucinate include:
- “The best thing Snyder’s done to improve understanding of logic puzzle construction since Puzzlecraft“
- “Mostly clueless, certainly too focused on the number forty-five which isn’t the answer to anything, but fun nonetheless”.
Join the discussion on the GMPuzzles Discord.
Note: The puzzle in the image above, a perfect combination of ideas we’ve explored in 2024 (one-star Queens/Star Battle and creative Sudoku), is a Christmas favorite from 2018.
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Added (2:05PM) Several people have asked what kind of sudoku might appear, people who are interested in puzzles and wanted to check in on me as we tend to do at the end of the year (I turn 45 in January and have had a good year, thanks for asking!).
Well, the main series is going to be Classic Sudoku as you know it. Because it is interesting to me for a lot of reasons including testing approaches to competition and puzzle setting / design rules and searching for unexpected things where people have stopped looking.
But I have been thinking of other interesting ideas to share for those who aren’t into classic sudoku puzzles but like other puzzles and things. Ideas that might pop up when I’m also thinking about the silly “is AI coming to take my job” question as I got in a recent interview on LinkedIn. As a creative thinker and problem solver, I can do more with a broken pencil than an AI in puzzle design even if I prefer to work digitally and with software tools and even AI sometimes.
Today, I challenged myself to write the most interesting sudoku I could with just one missing digit. It is a fun prompt to give a puzzle constructor and/or AI because it might not make sense. The image below isn’t my answer. But it is a start.
I didn’t go smaller, as it turns out I can’t outdo Randall’s Binary Sudoku but that doesn’t have proper regions anyway so I argue this is the absolute smallest for a 1-cell blank puzzle.
And in terms of what is coming, I have written the most interesting 80-given Sudoku-ey thing in history with one missing cell I’d love to see how you’d fill. But it’s not ready to share yet. It is the Ulysses of 1-cell missing Sudoku and before today you didn’t even think about those.
