OddThinking

I haven’t been meaning to harp on about hardware failures.

I’ve been meaning to address some more interesting subjects.

What topics do people find interesting?

Based on my logs, the answer is horrifying. While the CLOSE THAT WINDOW! article had a brief spurt of fashion, the Pursuing Sudoku with Pseudo-code article remains the best-seller.

Why am I horrified?

Mainly, because my interest in Sudoku has waned; I originally set out to prove it had been over-hyped, only – it seems – to contribute to it.

I did try to take up the gauntlet about a month ago; I wanted to clarify my statements about “guessing” which people were misinterpreting. I also wanted to see if I couldn’t find an answer to a question that was plaguing me (and now someone has asked me that same question directly).

To do that, I tried to go back to the original paper that proved that Sudoku was NP-complete. That paper distracted me when it referred to my old friends, Nonograms, as well as Slitherlinks. Slitherlinks led me to play at Puzzle Japan before wandering off after finishing all their free demos.

About the same time, I was introduced to Conceptis Puzzles by someone who clearly hates my blog – it has been chewing up my perfectly good blogging time ever since.

Conceptis not only have nonograms (which they call Pic-a-Pix, in the apparent belief that there aren’t enough names for it already!) and Sudoku (yawn) but a couple of other puzzle types: Link-A-Pix and Fill-A-Pix, which fill a similar void in a puzzle-lover’s life.

I find myself being sorely tempted to write some software to solve the Link-a-Pix problem purely so that I stop wasting time on the things.

Meantime, my attempt to please my punters by writing more about Sudoku goes by the wayside.