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.