Will Shortz Presents The Little Black Book of Sudoku: 400 Puzzles by Will Shortz

Will Shortz Presents The Little Black Book of Sudoku: 400 Puzzles Reviews

• 
  Matt

  A quick and dirty Sudoku tutorial to follow:
  
  This book contains 400 total puzzles. There are 4 different categories of difficulty: Light and Easy, Moderate, Difficult and Beware Very Challenging. I'm on the Difficult ones. I got this book on Memorial day last year and am 215 puzzles into it. I put it up for a few months to pursue less cerebral activities. Now, I do about 2 puzzles a day.
  
  The puzzles fascinate the math creature in me, and I do really enjoy the brain power behind figuring out the solutions or coming up with a clever technique to uncover a number. When I first started doing sudokus, I was fresh out of college and using my college skills, I figured out an algorithm to solve the puzzles and wrote a computer program to do just that. That was fun. But it is more fun to do them on your own of course.
  
  This book takes the 'wax-on wax-off' approach to doing these types of puzzles. After doing 100 consecutive easy puzzles, you're ready for something difficult. You will find yourself tracking from 3 to five to seven numbers in your head at a time while looking at a seemingly unrelated blank grid as you progress. So, here are some methods you can use to tackle some of these problems:
  
  Adjacent Elimination by sequence:
  To begin any puzzle, I go through each number, 1 - 9, to see if I can fill in any blanks. Start with the number one, find all occurences of that number already placed on the puzzle. scan adjacent grids for that number. 3X3 sections lacking that number, attempt to elminate rows and or columns that number can occupy by the numbers in in the adjacent grids:
  
  probalby a good thing good reads doesn't allow table formatting for html. Just copy the tags below into wordpad and save as sudoku_method.htm and then double click on it. You'll see. I'll provide a link to the page once I actually build it later.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  1 X X
  
  
  X X X
  
  
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  X X X
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  X X 1
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Would yield:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  1 X X
  
  
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  X X X
  
  
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  X X 1
  
  
  
  
  
  
  you know that a one should go into position (2,1) of the ? grid.
  
  More to follow.
• 
  Tarot

  A lifetime's worth of sudoku puzzles in varying difficulties. It's a thick but portable hardbound book so it won't get bent or frayed in your bag, and it's spiral-bound so it's easy to flip pages and you can clip a pencil inside or, if you dare, a pen.
• 
  Paul

  I will be "currently-reading" or solving this one for a while...especially since I rarely do them...
• 
  nico

  I HATE MATH END OF STORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!