Clueless Special 109?

This forum is dedicated to the <a href="http://www.sudocue.net/clueless.php">Clueless Specials</a> published each Monday on the website.
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Børge
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Clueless Special 109?

Post by Børge »

As I have feared after Ruud haven't posted any new Clueless Explosion puzzles after number 85, it now looks like the already uploaded Clueless Special puzzles have been exhausted.

What now?

The best short term solution is probably to generate a Clueless Special using the last version of JSudoku. The attempts I have made so far, have all generated far too difficult puzzles (solvable using brute force only). But perhaps someone else has more luck.
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lynn893
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Post by lynn893 »

This is terrible. Ruud know's how many people frequent this site for his puzzles. For him to make addicts of us all, then to just leave us hi and dry is unacceptable. The only reason that I can think for this happening, is that Ruud was arrested and thrown in jail! For dealing sudoku! And making sudoku addicts.

(Sorry, I had to liven this site up a bit, considering it's either laugh about the lack of puzzles, or cry, and I hate crying)

Ruud, we miss you. Please come back! :(
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Post by cowgirl »

lynn893 wrote:This is terrible. Ruud know's how many people frequent this site for his puzzles. For him to make addicts of us all,

Ruud, we miss you. Please come back! :(
Ruud,
please come back. This dutch girl missing your puzzles too. :cry:

And next, (hopely not) the samurai wil stop to :cry:
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Post by Børge »

cowgirl wrote:And next, (hopely not) the samurai wil stop to :cry:
Unfortunately, a pretty sure bet is that this will eventually happen :cry:
To me it seem that Ruud is currently not uploading new puzzles to SudocCue.net and when all puzzles of a given type have been published then there are no more.

For Samurai www.samurai-sudoku.com is probably the best alternative. They have puzzles of 5 difficulties; from Naked and Hidden Singles only, to Hidden Pairs and Triplets and X-Wings. Cannot remember if I ever have seen a Swordfish or a Jellyfish.

Using this Excel file you can in less than a minute rip the Sudoku code for a Samurai from the www.samurai-sudoku.com Internet site and onto the clipboard. And from there you can paste it into the Clueless Helper.

I am sorry that I cannot make as good clueless puzzles as Ruud but hopefully I can improve. More feedback (both negative and positive) regarding the quality and difficulty of the puzzles would make it much easier for me. Without feedback I have absolutely no idea where I stand. I have a thick hide and have no problems with negative feedback. Thanks to Jean-Christophe and the latest version of JSudoku I have now "rated" many of Ruud’s puzzles and have a better idea of what makes his puzzles Tough, Hard or Very Hard. I can now also much better and faster rate my own puzzles.

@Marlie:
If you feel for it, perhaps calling Ruud and asking if he plans to come back or not is prudent. If he plans to stay away for a long time or forever, many people here would probably appreciate a new version of Clueless Helper, which also allows pasting in Clueless puzzles. I think he owes that to all his loyal fans that prefer the Clueless Helper over other helpers/solvers.
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Post by cowgirl »

Hoi
Thans for your answer,
And i appreciate al things you do for us, the addicts players from clueless, explosion and samurai.
I can't play well, with others programms, because the englisch :oops: .
But I will try again. First the excel file, how to make this in the helper.
Marlie understand and write its better, and will help me i hope, if se has the time for it, but i now se is very busy on this moment.
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Post by Børge »

cowgirl wrote:I can't play well, with others programms, because the englisch :oops: .
But I will try again. First the excel file, how to make this in the helper.
I can make you a German version of the instructions if that helps?
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Post by cowgirl »

Børge wrote:I can make you a German version of the instructions if that helps?
Hoi Borge
No thanks, very nice of you, but i must take the time, and try to do the englisch version. I now that the most programms are in englisch,
en with the clueless helper also, but in the past i can ask Ruud or other dutch people to help me, and now i playing with succes with it
When i have succes, with you excel program make it into the helper i write this here . :D oke.
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Post by FirstOfNine »

just a thought... if Ruud really has stopped working on the sudocues, this site might also be taken offline from a point in the future and we will all be "lost in space"... as this forum and also the old puzzles might no longer be accessible.
Borge, maybe you should think about moving to an own site with your own Cluelesses and Explosions and advertise the link here?
Thank you very much for your work on all this!
cheers
G.
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Post by Oscar »

I am part of the group of Sudoku adicts and also of the CluelessHelper adicts. This program is very easy to use and really fast when you go from one sudoku to another!
I am posting comments every time I get done one of Borge's. I agree that giving him feeedback is the best way to improve his skills on creating these big sudokus.
My opinion is that the "good" ones are those which are easy as techniques, but require jumping from one to another of the subjacent sudokus. And this applies to Samurai, Special ans Explosion as well.
Thanks Borge for the excelent job on posting and keeping us actives.
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Post by Børge »

Oscar, cowgirl, FirstOfNine and jsmif, thanks a lot for the feedback.
Everybody else, please throw in your two cents.

For new puzzles I will post here I have decided to introduce my own rating, i.e. a "Børge Rating" based only on the solving techniques required. The number of each technique required will not be reflected in the rating. Please see my UPCOMING post in this thread:
http://www.sudocue.net/forum/viewtopic. ... 6ff53cfa17

I have also decided to make my personal Sudoku puzzle archive public available for a limited time. It contains approx. 200 Samurai and approx. 400 vanilla Sudoku puzzles (ready to print Word Documents + Sudoku Code). Some vanilla Sudokus are from a source I think no one else here knows about (allegedly by a Norwegian woman exclusively hand made Sudokus for a Norwegian magazine). The ratings are called "The Good" (NO: Den Gode), "The Evil" (NO: Den Onde) and "The Gruesome" (NO: Den Grusomme). Please see my upcoming thread "Puzzle Archive" here:
http://www.sudocue.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=11
FirstOfNine wrote:just a thought... if Ruud really has stopped working on the sudocues, this site might also be taken offline from a point in the future and we will all be "lost in space"... as this forum and also the old puzzles might no longer be accessible.
Borge, maybe you should think about moving to an own site with your own Cluelesses and Explosions and advertise the link here?
Let’s not worry about theoretical problems in advance. From an extremely reliable source I know that Ruud has paid his provider for the hosting of SudoCue.net until mid December 2008.
I am afraid that hosting an Internet site and a forum is beyond what I have time for. Besides that, my knowledge about this specific IT topic is limited. Although I have studied IT and have worked in the IT industry for some 30 years (starting out with programs on punched cards) one of the few IT topics that I have barely been in contact with is web design and home pages. Should the worst happen and SudoCue.net ceases to exist I hope that one of the forum members that already have an Internet presence will take over.

I am also not planning to post Clueless Explosion and Special puzzles for an extended period of time. What I want to achieve is to optimize and perfect the process I use to such an extent that everyone that knows how to solve a Clueless puzzle will be able to generate a "Tough/Hard/Very Hard" one within 5-15 minutes. Then I will stop posting puzzles and if not other forum members then are willing to take turns posting puzzles, my personal conclusion is that the interest in further puzzles is non existent or everybody is happy with the clueless puzzles they generate themselves. This is the hard reality.

I can now generate a Clueless Explosion (Special is another story) in 3-4 minutes, but the yield (i.e. the number of puzzles in the range Tough - Very Hard) is too low (approx 60%), but I have some ideas how to improve this. It will likely double or triple the generation time but will hopefully get the yield above 90%, which is sufficient.
The first step in the generation process, which takes about 90 seconds, mostly produces a Very Easy puzzle (Naked Singles only). I then use an algorithm to remove clues until the desired difficulty is reached. The problem is that this process is currently irreversible, i.e. no backtracking if the puzzle suddenly becomes to hard, and my experience is that removing only a single clue can turn a puzzle from Very Easy into Ultra Hard. So the next step is to build in backtracking and then see how things turn out.
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Post by DianaB »

Thanks for creating the puzzles, info, etc., Borge!

Your answer to First of Nine:
I am afraid that hosting an Internet site and a forum is beyond what I have time for.
That's one thing I've got a lot of...time, but very little computer knowledge (basically what a secretary would know). Took ONE Basic programming class...~20 years ago???? :oops:

If I can be of any help, let me know. I follow directions pretty good :wink:
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Post by Jean-Christophe »

Børge wrote:From an extremely reliable source I know that Ruud has paid his provider for the hosting of SudoCue.net until mid December 2008.
If it's the same source that I used, then we know the domain name(s) have been paid, but not necessarilly the hosting (server..) which is a different service.
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Post by FirstOfNine »

hi all,

well, with me it's the other way round, I do web programming all the time but don't have much of it (time) left for other things.... ;-)

Maybe we could find a public forum to move to, or.... I know that one can create a blog at wordpress.com for free. We could all post our contributions there (e.g. Puzzles as posts and comments below). If there is interest, I could also look for the possibility of a forum. I don't know how much traffic this generates, therefore it might be better to have something which is hosted on a public server, not on a private account.

cheers, FiNi
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Post by Børge »

Jean-Christophe wrote:If it's the same source that I used, then we know the domain name(s) have been paid, but not necessarilly the hosting (server..) which is a different service.
JC, you are basically right. But AFAIK Ruud acquired the domain name and the hosting from the same provider at the same time and my experience is that you then normally renew both contracts simultaneously for a minimum of one year at a time
FirstOfNine wrote:Maybe we could find a public forum to move to, or....
Before continuing all kinds of speculations here, it would IMHO be more productive to phone Ruud and ask him what his future plans for SudoCue.net is.
Marlie, are you willing to do this?

If we must relocate to another forum, www.djape.net would IMHO be a good candidate.
But doing so before Ruud officially announces the shutdown of Sudocue.net would in my opinion be extremely disloyal.

I did not put all the cards on the table in my previous post. With on of my three providers I do have 2GB of completely unused web space and I probably, at least with some help from FirstOfNine, could manage to install phpBB.

The truth is that as long as I am officially still living in Germany I am not willing to do this. IMNSHO Germany has all kinds of strange laws, also for web presences and Internet sites. From what I hear and read you can easily be fined several thousand Euros for not adhering 100% to these laws. There are lawyers who make their living from this, i.e. just search the web and home pages and check if they adhere to all these complicated laws; and if not they admonish the owners and request thousands of Euros in reparation.

In my case two of the main problems are that you on your web site must have an imprint with your FULL name, address, e-mail address and phone number. In addition AFAIK the owner a web site is 100% responsible for the content of all posts in a BB he hosts. For example: If I host a BB and someone puts illegal propaganda on it, I could be punished for it.

If Ruud was living in Germany he probably would have gotten into legal trouble for the operation of SudoCue.net; especially for several of the pictures he uses like the one from the film Clueless for the Weekly Clueless Special and the one for "Miller Lite ™", which is a trademark of Miller Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.
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