{"id":55,"date":"2006-12-01T17:00:01","date_gmt":"2006-12-01T16:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/?p=55"},"modified":"2021-09-15T21:17:36","modified_gmt":"2021-09-15T20:17:36","slug":"gattaimaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/?p=55","title":{"rendered":"GattaiMaker"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent the last week writing a new program which I called GattaiMaker<\/strong>. The name says it all. The program can generate overlapping Sudoku puzzles.<\/p>\n

It is a major improvement over the CluelessMaker<\/strong> program which I used before for overlapping puzzles. CluelessMaker required me to generate a batch of puzzles with my regular Sudoku generator, which were glued together by CluelessMaker by relabeling the digits in the overlapping regions. Several configurations were tested and the best scoring combination was saved.<\/p>\n

GattaiMaker<\/strong> can create any overlapping puzzle from scratch. It uses a DLX engine which is configured for the variant to be created. Diagonals are an option. The current version only supports global symmetry in every conceivable way, but the next version will also support local symmetry. A built-in solver can rate the puzzles. I’ve created it as a step-solver, so it does all occurrences of a specific type of move in a single step. Rating depends on the number of steps and the solving techniques used. This may obscure some advanced moves, but the overall difficulty of an overlapping puzzle is related to the number of alternative moves, which are measured by step counting. Finding the only possible single in a puzzle with 25 overlapping Sudokus is harder than spotting locked candidates when there are 20 present in the puzzle.<\/p>\n

Internally, all solving techniques operate on the DLX data structures. I’ve never managed to do this before, but it works perfectly. No additional arrays, counters and masks are required. Every placement and elimination is implemented as a DLX operation.<\/p>\n

The only format not supported yet is the Clueless Explosion, as the program cannot yet handle internally disjoint boxes. The regular Clueless format is supported, as well as the new Windmill format and two Clueless types merged with Sumo and Shaolin, respectively.<\/p>\n

For advertising, I posted several different puzzles on my website and various forums.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent the last week writing a new program which I called GattaiMaker. The name says it all. The program can generate overlapping Sudoku puzzles. It is a major improvement over the CluelessMaker program which I used before for overlapping puzzles. CluelessMaker required me to generate a batch of puzzles with my regular Sudoku generator, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-sudocuenet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.sudocue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}