fnord
Posted on: Wed Jun 03, 2015 1:39 am
Posts: 6 Joined: Tue Feb 10, 2015 4:06 am
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New operator suggestion: Straights
There's a number game called Straights (or Str8s) that's not unsimilar to Sudoku.
And I thought it might work well as operator in calcdoku puzzles.
The concept would be that in a Straights-n cage all numbers are n apart. For 2-field cages, that's obviously the same as -, but for 3+ fields it's not. So, as an example, in a Straights-1 cage 2,3,4 would be valid, but also 7,8,9. In a straights-3 cage, 1-4-7 would be valid as would be 3-6-9 etc.
It's a simple concept, but I think it could interact nicely with some typical solving strategies. At the very least, it allows for some number combinations to be simultanously valid that no current operator would allow (see examples above - no operator currently in use would allow both 2,3,4 and 7,8,9 as solution) while at the same time being rather simple to grasp.
I've got zero experience actually designing calcdoku puzzles, so it's hard for me to predict how those would impact difficutly and if they add something in practice, but I thought I'd at least throw them out there!
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pnm
Posted on: Wed Jun 03, 2015 9:06 am
Posts: 3305 Joined: Thu May 12, 2011 11:58 pm
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Re: New operator suggestion: Straights
Thanks, very cool suggestion, I'll definitely look at what's involved in implementing this...
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