On Wed, 2014-06-04 at 12:31 -0400, Thomas Mills Hinkle wrote:
I thought the show-possible-numbers solution was useful for difficult positions, but of course if there are easy moves to make it is pointless. That said, I could see this becoming part of a hints heirarchy. Maybe, for example, the "hints" feature could work by first telling you what *cell* could be filled (i.e. what cells would have only 1 possible number). If there were no such cells, maybe "show possible numbers" would become available as the next hint step. I guess all of this is to say that it might be interesting to think through the game-play workflow and create a "hint" workflow that tried to give hints in a smarter way.
Maybe. "Show Possible Numbers" across the entire board seems really extreme, though it probably wouldn't be useful if we were to restrict it to individual cells for each hint.
One thing I like about the way I originally implemented hints was that you never were given a hint based off of the solution grid; somehow it seems pure to me to have the hints only work from the current grid you have, and make users find any mistakes they've made on their own.
I agree that it's good that the Hint feature is based on what the user has currently filled out: in other games, Hint just gives you the next step, but in Sudoku it shows you how to help yourself. If it were to reveal a number, it wouldn't be fun at all. I actually think it'd be good to use hints to point out any mistakes the user has made, since a mistake in a Sudoku puzzle is really devastating.
The colors are hard to get right -- I think I wrote an algorithm at some point trying to get decent colors based off the theme, but it could go horribly wrong and come out pretty garish. That said, for teaching the game, the highlighter could be quite handy so I'm glad you're thinking about not eliminating it entirely. It would be worth making sure the lines between the boxes are extra thick -- I remember seeing a version at one point in which the widths had all been reduced and it was much harder to see. Sorry not to be more specific -- though I did implement the game, I haven't played it actively in years.
They currently are extra-thick, but we have a new design that calls for using different colors instead of different thickness: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710626
My only thought is that trackers & notes could be combined, perhaps, as we simplify. I'd be interested to know who uses them; I believe I implemented notes based on a feature request originally; I don't recall what the impetus was for trackers.
I think they are used for different purposes. Notes are useful to keep track of possibilities; the tracker is useful when you're stumped and start guessing.
A final question: has any work been done on the game-generation algorithm itself? Back when I had time to think about such things, the next step I wanted to take with the game was to work on algorithms to generate *hard* puzzles more quickly. I think lots of people like really hard sudoku, and my algorithm basically randomly stumbles on them as is, but it doesn't do it nearly as often as I'd like.
We have identified the puzzle generator as an area for improvement but I haven't investigated it further yet. If your algorithm generates hard sudokus accidentally, that could explain why sometimes it takes too long to generate a sudoku of a particular difficulty. We're looking at the generator in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=731215 Related: we have one confirmed occurrence of an invalid puzzle, and it'd be good to investigate how this can happen: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=619190
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