[billa]

Solver link

README

I've been working on this website on/off for a couple of years (mostly off). It's my attempt to define a logical grading structure for Calcudoku puzzles, in the same vein as Sudoku Explainer. Puzzles are solved and rated by the most difficult technique required to crack them. So far the implemented techniques are as follows:

Naked single
Hidden single
Pointing/claiming candidates within cages
Hidden subsets
Fish
Region Totals (Parity, Sum)
AIC
Cage Combinations

Further documentation can be found at the "README" link above. Each technique is 100% logical and humanly viable as long as you keep track of all information in the puzzle. The correpondence to human solving difficulty is not 1:1, and it never will be, but I think it provides a good baseline. I'll implement more techniques eventually but for now I'd like to take a break to focus on other projects.

I built this with a focus on speed, so the code is fairly optimised, but certain extremely difficult puzzles may take some time to solve, such as the infamous 9x9 from 2nd April 2013 which takes 16.7 seconds.

You can import puzzles manually by clicking "Enter puzzle" and drawing it out. You can also share puzzles by appending ?p={puzzle string} to the URL. Here are a few example links.

Yesterday's 9x9
2nd April 2013 9x9
A puzzle from Tatham's site with a lot of AIC
Similar to above

Cheers

[frederick]

nice work
heck of a hobby

[pnm]

Thanks for the post, very impressive

.. moved it to "Solving strategies and tips".

It could also have gone into the "describe your solver" topic,
but probably it's less visible then.