Remember that lame-ass math puzzle thread?

[Dr Unne]

Yes. And about a total of an hour. I did evil after playing the easy one 3
times. It was all in the same sitting. It was last Friday. Just played Evil
again without any real distractions unless you count parents, music, and
making food, but I wasn't actually IMing someone, and I noticed the pause
button this time so I paused it to stir/drain/eat my pasta.

.opt

You didn't answer "how".

[Old Manus]

Congratulations! You solved the Sudoku in 23 seconds! You 1337 h4xx0r!

[Del Murder]

No, I'm not trying to create them. I'm just curious as to how many possible combinations there are, and how many numbers one needs to be unique. I started trying to compute the first one, and got through the first few squares, but once you try finding the combinations for the middle squares it gets tricky.

For example, for the upper leftmost square, there are 9 (1-9) different numbers you can put there. Then for the square to its right there are 8 possible numbers, since you can't use the first number again. You can go on down the line to find that there are 9! ways to fill the first row. Then, for the second row there are 6 ways to fill the first square, since it shares a 3X3 box with the three numbers above it, and you can't use any of those. So now you have 9!*6 ways to fill 1 row and 1 square in the next row. And so on...

[Spammerman]

Congratulations, U have shot the guy who posted sudoku on the web in .32 seeconds.

[Endless]

No, I'm not trying to create them. I'm just curious as to how many possible combinations there are, and how many numbers one needs to be unique.

According to Bertram Felgenhauer, there are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible valid 3x3x3 sudoku grids, which falls to 5,472,730,538 when symmetries are taken into account.

And the lowest number of hints known as of now that leads to a unique solution is 17.

[-N-]

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[rubah]

update your firefox neel.

And that was three minutes you could've been on irc!

[Xaven]

I finished easy in 30:27. Darn. (first try)

[raskerino]

4:14 seconds on easy, I don't have much skill though I restart 'til it works with my specifically bad method of doing these (in other words any medium would take me an hour).

[Lindy]

"Remember that lame-ass math puzzle thread?"

Yeah, but Sudoku isn't maths, it's just number positioning.

I think it's Japanese for "Haha stupid westerners waste time on puzzles while we further our advanced technology".

Or something like that anyway.

Probably without the R's.

[Del Murder]

What have you furthered, Lindy?

[Lindy]

Myself actually, in the time I see other people doing Sudoku puzzles on the train when I'm going to Uni, I'm doing Biology/Chemistry/Biochemistry work for my Degree course.

[Del Murder]

[eestlinc]

cool, I got 5:52 on easy. the faster i can do them the less work i am shirking!