Rating Assassins

sudokuEd · Post by **sudokuEd** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 10:36 am

Found a bug in SS which could affect many puzzles & their scores. Back later - hopefully not 5 months this time!!

Cheers
Ed

frank · Post by **frank** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 3:03 am

Richard's SudokuSolver v3.0.0 rates this as 0.48 and also 0.60 depending on
how I open the file. However if a puzzle ever deserved a rating of 0 it is
this one. I have been very interested in SudokuSolver ratings and have
used it to rate many puzzles from different sites with fascinating results.
I applaud the effort to get a rating scheme is - it is well worthwhile.

But - let me know what happened to this one.

Text: 3x3::k

769:1794:259:516

1542

2056:521

267

1805

1295

785

1555

789

2327

281:538

284

1054

800:545

1827

1061

551

2089

811:300

558:815

2353:306

1332

822

1080

2106:571:316

1342

2112:577

323

837

2375:328

2378

844

2126:591

Andrew · Post by **Andrew** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 5:40 am

Nice April Fool's Day post Frank!

Taking the point of rating this diagram, there are 81 Naked Singles so the score must be slightly greater than zero.

sudokuEd · Post by **sudokuEd** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 6:46 am

frank wrote:Richard's SudokuSolver v3.0.0 rates this as 0.48 and also 0.60 depending on how I open the file. However if a puzzle ever deserved a rating of 0 it isthis one

Ha, nice one Frank. Richard loves bug-finders! He'll enjoy that one.

0.48 is the equivalent of a zero rating. We've always called this an Assassin killer scoring project - not killers in general. As you can tell, SS is not so good at the bottom end and tends to squash them in pretty tight. Ruud's software method that he was working on with SumoCue (unreleased) was much more aimed at the lower end and spread those out much more.

frank wrote:I have been very interested in SudokuSolver ratings and have used it to rate many puzzles from different sites with fascinating results

An update here on any generalizations/observations/results would be very interesting, especially as I'm a regular lurker elsewhere (sadly not Frank's for a long while

).

frank wrote:applaud the effort to get a rating scheme is - it is well worthwhile

Thanks! Richard has a long list of wish-list changes to SS(v3.0) (hidden killer triple, ALS cage block, killer quad etc) including many things for other formats, so the next V of scoring won't be for a good while.

Just to restate my last update - SSscore(v3) is only reasonably accurate up to about 1.40. It will usually err on the lower side. This is because "easier" puzzles that have a long solution set the maximum at about 1.40.

Thanks for your interest.

Cheers
Ed