At Home with John and Debbie

I bought a copy of the Independent today, just so I could try Super Sudoku. That’s the one I mentioned before, with 4×4 4×4 grids, and the numbers 0 to F.

I’m afraid the news isn’t good. Partly there’s sour grapes, because after about an hour and a half’s toil, I found I’d made a mistake and was forced to either put two zeros in the same 4×4 grid, or give up: in Sudoku you can’t really backtrack. But mostly, the problem is that toil is exactly how it felt. 16 digits is more than I can conveniently process in one go, mentally.

Scanning a box, row or column to see if a number is there, feels like a chore every time, whereas with 9 digits it’s not a problem.

As we’ve seen, 4 digits is too few. 9 is perfect.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 2nd, 2005 at 15:55 and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.