I've enjoyed doing crosswords for many years, especially quick crosswords (actually, only really quick crosswords - I've tried to figure out cryptics several times and never seem to get anywhere)¹.

My brother-in-law introduced me to The Times' Su Doku puzzle while we were in Britain. It's also an interesting puzzle, but it has one intensely frustrating feature: it is much harder to go back if you make a mistake. If you screw up a crossword clue then you can just rub it out (assuming you have not used pen). With the Su Doku puzzle, the need to track your working is much greater and a mistake will corrupt not just the answers, but also the carefully constructed edifice of interrelated numbers built up to that point.

For me, having figured out the basic rules it seems to be more a question of not making these mistakes. I am not very successful in that. I've already tried one of the example puzzles twice (the medium one) and once I produced a paradoxical mishmash, the second time I produced the wrong solution. I've had more luck with the hard puzzle, which I finished quite handily.

I'm not going to play this game any more, however, because it's too time consuming. Because of the way my brain works, I can spot the patterns easily enough but I am not rigorous enough in following through the consequences, which is where the mistakes creep in. I could work to improve my solving style using some less mechanistic techniques, although that would rob me of even more time that I do not have.

But it's a great pastime, if you have a few hours to spare per puzzle.

[1] curiously, just British crosswords. The layouts used in the American crosswords are too dense for my taste.

Posted by Dunx at March 30, 2005 03:14 PM