Started out looking at a few sudokus nearly a year ago when it was first introduced here in Sweden, solved a couple of easy ones but never really found it interesting enough to continue with. The big hype had just begun and all I thought was, what's the big deal? it's _logic_, not some new lifealtering invention, been around for as long as humans have had rational thought.
Several months passed untill about a month ago when I was having a break at work and decided to go get something to drink from the shop. In there I saw a Sudoku periodical with a pencil taped to it. I figured what the heck, break was long and booring so I figured I'd give it another go and see what the whole hype was all about, plus it was very cheap and it had a pencil
.There I was sitting in the car with my partner beside me rolling her eyes and wonderd what the heck kinda grass I'd been smoking, completly engrossed by the puzzles in front of me.
I solved a couple, hmm this was fun, but not at all very challenging, (all naked singles following eachother
) luckily there were harder ones in the paper aswell, gave one of the harder ones a whack and all of a sudden the whole break had vanished somewhere. (must have been some kind of time displacement phenomena triggerd by the sudoku, it just vanished).So when I get home the first thing I do is fire up the computer and start searching for more Sudokus, I stumble into sourceforge and find a very basic sudoku generator/solver called Sudoku for Windows.
Not really satisfied with that program I start searching for more better ones, so I find Simple Sudoku. Wow, neat!
I played around with it a bit but soon found it a bit constrained, the sudokus were always symetrical and the program was still too simplistic for my tastes.
I go into the Sudoku Programmers forum and start looknig around in the Software forum and there it was, SudoCue. Man was I hooked, It was everything I could ever wish for in a Sudoku generator/solver and more.
On to this site, looking around and then going into the Solving Guide I start to read and begin to learn more advanced technuiqes for solving.
As it is now I have learned Naked Singles, Hidden Singles, Locked candidates, Naked pairs, still working on Naked triplets and Hidden pairs.
One technuiqe at a time, I intend to master them all.
Finding the Lite sudokus on this site and working with them I am slowly but surely becomming better and faster at solving sudokus.
I am also playing around with the sudoku17 database solving as many of them as I can trying out various strategies etc. (just for the fun of it)
Any hints and tips on becomming better (aside from the obvious, solving sudoku after sudoku) would be much appreciated.
