Still recovering from my trip to Boston so this week’s note will be brief. I hope you enjoyed the Arrow Sudoku and Cave Puzzles. This coming week will bring the first of the loop puzzle genres, Masyu, and Consecutive Sudoku, another of my favorite sudoku variants from the past, in this case from explorations in Mutant Sudoku.

As the topic for this week, I want to know what you think of the times given with the puzzle each day. For the competitive puzzlers, do you like seeing these times? Is the master time a bit too hard to reach? Would a slightly easier standard give a better target? For the recreational puzzlers, does seeing a time change how you approach the puzzle to care more about the clock than otherwise? Would you like an option to keep them hidden instead?

I am considering adding a self-reporting of times to the solve box once there is a finishers page for each puzzle. It is not a high priority at the moment as I view the times as a guideline to set an expectation for the puzzle, and not yet that my site is a “competitive puzzle site” like some others that record solving histories and such. But I welcome your input on any changes you might like me to think about going forward since I do have several excellent testers that have been giving me good data every day.

Cheers,
Dr. S

Today is probably the last day of the MIT Mystery Hunt and I’ll be puzzled out for the next few days, but I wanted to offer another Doctor’s Note on the state of Grandmaster Puzzles. After Jack Bross’s frightening guess of Thermo-Sudoku and Star Battle last week, I’m sure he can divine — when I say my favorite (non-Snyder) Sudoku variant, and my favorite “underrepresented” puzzle are coming this week — what you’ll see throughout the next six days.

After three weeks of puzzles, I wanted to hear your initial impressions on the puzzle difficulties here. Do you appreciate seeing a mix from “Monday” to the end of the week? Are some puzzles too trivial or too hard? Obviously some solvers will be in a very different part of their learning curves so I hardly expect to be able to satisfy everyone.

Finally, I wanted to thank Bram de Laat this week for helpful insight on the origins of Star Battle that have been added to that rules page. In addition to Bram, Wei-Hwa Huang and Nick Baxter have been particularly helpful in some of the research I’ve needed for puzzle origins and a thank you goes out to both of them as well.

— Dr. Sudoku

Another week, and another set of puzzles I hope you really enjoyed.

By now you are probably sensing that during this “introduction” phase I will be showcasing one sudoku variation and one other puzzle style each week. This will continue this week with another of my own sudoku variations and another of my favorite puzzle styles. Can you guess which ones?

All of the sudoku variations are present in books I’ve published if you are interested in more; the puzzles — with the exception of TomTom Puzzles — are all styles that I’ve never had the opportunity to write for any domestic publisher. But now that I am publisher, all of these styles will be featured in “The Art of Puzzles” and I hope some of you choose to contribute puzzles to this book project.

This 50:50 split is good for the introduction phase of Grandmaster Puzzles, but does beg the question of what ratio of Sudoku to other puzzles you would like to see in the future. If the question was about most other sources of Sudoku, this would be an easy 0:100 for me. But Grandmaster Sudoku are very cool, and I hope any rating you give is reserved to the quality of Grandmaster puzzles in each of these genres, not your own preconceptions formed from “Number Place” puzzles that lack the elegance of hand-crafting.

In other site news, sometime this week I will add the much requested “pdf” form of each puzzle at the same time as posting for my paper solvers. Other changes will be coming by the end of the month, but certainly not this week as I prepare for a trip to Cambridge for the MIT Mystery Hunt. Better Luck This Time I always say!

— Dr. Sudoku

I hope you enjoyed the first week of Grandmaster Puzzles. To some this may look just like a new home for my old blog. But this is actually the start to a large project I’ve dreamed of for awhile, to get more “puzzle” books published and improve the ecosystem for logic puzzle construction in the west where computer-generation is still the name of the day.

Eventually there will be a Sunday puzzle here. It will be bigger and better (but not necessarily harder) than any other puzzle during the week. But for the first many weeks, as I introduce some of the styles I’ll be publishing soon, Sunday will be the day for the Doctor’s Note. This will also be the right spot for you to comment in any way you want about the site such as new features you’d like to see (like a place to enter your time with your solution, or a page for leaderboard tracking). The site will continue to improve while the quality of the puzzle content stays as high as it can be. This will become the community for logic puzzle solving and I’d appreciate your likes, tweets, +1s, or other links to this page to help the community grow.

A big thank you goes out to Dave Millar, of Perplexible and The Griddle fame in the world of puzzles, for his help designing this website. Most of the images inside the frames are mine. But the rest is mostly him. He took some sketches from my puzzle notebooks and made a memorable blog theme. And he loaned some of his own API code to start our answer checking system which will get better as we go along.

So, what did you think of the first week of Grandmaster Puzzles? This week certainly had a very broad range in difficulty, but I expected both Sudoku and TomTom to be pretty familiar puzzles compared to what is coming. Next week will be a little more gentle, still with six quite interesting puzzles but two new styles.

–Dr. Sudoku