Category Archives: websites

development of sudoku related websites

The Clueless Days

Sometimes I feel clueless myself.

The first of these monster puzzles were meant as an experiment. People jumped on it and wanted more and more. Creating these puzzles manually involves some risk. You have a shot at it and when it can be solved by 10 instances of SudoCue, then it should be OK. Difficulty can only be determined by testing. Because that takes such a long time, I tend to approve anything that passes the test, no matter how difficult.

Now I have CluelessMaker. It accepts 9 template-generated puzzles and a solution as input, maps the 9 puzzles to the central solution, and solves the whole thing in a fraction of a second. It counts naked/hidden singles, line-box interactions and naked/hidden subsets. More techniques will be built into it, but I can manually assess an almost solved clueless to see what is needed to complete it. If it’s a fair technique, I’ll let it pass.

What worries me, is that players no longer fancy the ‘regular’ sudokus. They want more and more clueless specials. If have made 4 by hand, the rest will be machine made, and more reliable.

Also had some fun on the player’s forum with the superior and inferior threads.

Clueless the Sequel

I have managed to construct another Clueless Special. It took some time to build this one, because the diamonds template does not have a lot of room to play with. I had to change 3 of the 9 puzzles to ensure they have a unique solution with the center box filled.

When I tested the complete puzzle, it turned out to be extremely difficult, but solvable with a single solution. I wonder how many people will manage to solve it. It takes a lot of force to connect the dots in this one.

My hosting company www.mijndomein.nl is doing some maintenance that they think is best done at midnight. That is the time that all the addicts come to look for a new Nightmare. I hope they are ready now, because for me this is becoming a nightmare. Too many sites now depend on my puzzles.

More Free Hosting

Things are going too slow. I don’t know why.

Another free host added. They are all a little different, but very quickly to launch, and require no maintenance.

sudokuforum.nl suffered a severe forum-spam-attack yesterday. Edwin was not present, so the forum was a mess most of the day.

A nice list of keywords is present for SudokuStart. Got the languages with flag images, ratings and keywords, so now a few rating images and content can be added.

Free Hosting Satellites

With free hosting, it is possible to set up a few sites in a short amount of time. I was still collecting links for sudokustart and sudokuplaats, when I stumbled on a few free hosting companies. Daily sudokus are now shown on a couple of new sites, and links to sudocue.net have been added.

A Dutch user guide for SudoCue was long overdue, and in fact the only thing missing on sudokuplaats. It is now there.

Still programming and planning SudokuStart. This site must have a good launch, so I’ll give it a bit extra time.

Finally had contact with Milo, the site admin of the sudoku programmers forum. I’m now a moderator for the forum, which allows me to take care of the forum, by adding sticky topics and remove rubbish.

Another candidate for sudocue daily syndication, and received an interesting business proposal. The activities seem to produce results now.

SudokuStart

This was a little too tempting. I’ve been checking dozens of possible site names, most of them were already taken. I used those to build my links collection on www.sudokuplaats.nl.

Suddenly I discovered that sudokustart.com and other related names were not claimed yet. With my superior links database, this is the opportunity to create a very popular links site.

So, that will be done. SudokuStart is registered and I will build a dynamic Sudoku links collection that will make the others bow in humility. A very comprehensive search engine will be placed upon it. And a few ads sprinkled here and there, one’s got to eat, yes?

SudokuPlaats.nl upgrades part 3

I’m not sure why I’m so obsessed with this site. It has such a nice look, and it’s getting better and better. Spent today writing a maintenance interface for the links database.

This is almost a sellable concept. Anyway, I now have some experience in writing maintence pages in PHP. This might come in handy for my next venture, nuf said.

Before we continue, I do want a shout box on SudokuPlaats. So that’s the next challenge.

Uploaded 3 Nightmares.

Looks like Angus is ready to retire. That would leave an opportunity for other freeware programs.

SudokuPlaats.nl has a very nice daily Sudoku interface

OK, I had this coming for quite some time now, but my revision of www.SudokuPlaats.nl is now done. Those poor Dutch could not cope with the daily Nightmares I threw at them at SudoCue.net. It is the chosen few who dare to attack these monsters.

Anyway, the interface allows selection of difficulty, restart, check puzzel and show solution. What more do you need for these ‘easies’?

(update)

And now the navbar has been blinged, and the Links page is eckzdreamley cool, with search dropper, language flags and ratings. It’s all in the database too!

Easies uploaded

I uploaded a few thousand easy sudokus into my site database. They are easy because they only require singles to solve. They are also a heartache because they were selected for slow solving paths. The best one requires 26 rounds of solving. I will put these on my Dutch support site, and report availability to my syndicated sites.

Written a mail to a young sudoku site maker about invalid sudokus. Hope it does not scare him off.

A new top listing for Sudokus has emerged. I submitted sudocue.net and it went straight to the top. Now the pressure to come with the top 9×9 has eased a little. This looks like a good listing.

Readers?

Was surprised to see how many people are reading my daily entries here. OK, needed to tidy it up a bit, and translated the most recent posts in English. Blogging is a dangerous activity. Before you know it, everybody is looking over your shoulder.

Finished the Scanning article in www.Sudopedia.org. May need some revisions, but at least it is a consistent story now. Still no cowriters.

I have isolated the 400.000 Sudokus in my Access database that can be classified as ‘easy’. I will run a special program today, that performs a solving speed test on these sudokus. This is something I found out recently. It is not only the requirement of solving techniques, but also the solving speed that determines the difficulty of a sudoku. For the lower grades, this is the most important benchmark. A whole series of sub-grades can be worked out.

But not for me. I have to keep up my reputation, so I will always supply sudokus that are a tad more difficult than the rest of them. This solving speed test will help me pick out the nice ones.

Syndication

Syndication is ready. Sudokus can be retrieved from the site in various grades on a daily basis, the solution can be shown, with a choice of retrieving it in a text string or frame it in a page. I even set up a setup page to verify the frame settings and immediatly see the result. I’m really getting good at this stuff.

There are already 2 people ready to implement it. They will beta test it. Others should wait before they check out frametest.php.

Finally got a weapon against these stupid sites like www.free-sudokus.com, who pretend to deliver a daily sudoku, but deliver daily rubbish with (counted again today) 242 solutions to a single puzzle.