The Annotated Sudoku: Using Sudoglyphicstm…The Notably Better Way to Solve.

By Craig Williams

The Annotated Sudoku uses a simple marking system called Sudoglyphics, which builds a path for beginning, experienced, and expert solvers to discover the joy of successfully taking on even the most difficult puzzles and completing them faster than they might have thought possible. The method specifically records and updates the status of every possible answer that remains after an analysis has been performed. The constant marking keeps the solver more engaged between answers. Meanwhile, the accumulation of these marks build visual patterns that otherwise must be created and juggled in memory until they are needed to restart solving where others will most likely get stuck.
Included in the book is a step-by-step illustrated explanation for solving a complete, expert-level puzzle using the simple tools and strategies discussed.
Regardless of your experience, you can learn to take on the sudoku challenge at the highest level and perform faster without needlessly taxing your memory or backtracking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781477297605

Craig Williams

The author is an Ivy League graduate and a Big-4 Process Improvement consultant who was actually horrible at sudoku for an unmentionable period of time. However, he is tenacious about mental challenges, asks questions, records answers, and looks for what is missing (or not adequately explained) in everything he does at work and at play. So clearly, sudoku was a great place to start. He felt strongly that the joy of solving the more difficult puzzles was compromised by a lack of instructions discussing the importance of recording the ever-changing status of possible answers, not just recording indisputable ones. Further, with no apparent place to record this important information, solvers would have to remember the status of hundreds of tidbits they had deduced already (and if forgotten, they would be consigned to reperforming many of those analyses). Tedious. He felt that this unnecessary taxing of one’s memory rather than focusing on the next logical step, quite simply, took the fun out of the game. Which is why he created Sudoglyphics. Equipped with these simple marks, their placement and their subsequent use, anyone interested in solving sudoku or solving better may do so without backtracking. Now, he solves the most difficult puzzles (at the back of the best sudoku collections) in twelve to twenty minutes routinely.

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© 2013 G. Craig Williams. All Rights Reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 03/19/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4772-9760-5 (e)

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The Annotated Sudoku

Using Sudoglyphics™ for notably better solving

By Craig Williams

Do you find sudoku frustrating? Well, it’s not your fault.

Have you hit a plateau in your sudoku solving? I did, too. I really enjoy Sudoku now, but was horrible at it for an unmentionable period of time. As an Ivy League graduate with programming experience I believed I was sufficiently well-versed in logic to be capable of completing these puzzles in average time. I was even able to make several computerized models that aided completion. Solving on a computer instead of the standard layout (that a hundred million people use daily) confirmed that my reasoning was sound, but was not very consoling, otherwise.

My name is Craig Williams. By profession I am a puzzle thinker. That is, I have I worked for close to twenty years as a Process Improvement Consultant for Big-4 partnerships and Fortune-100 companies. Heuristics (a fancy name for Process Improvement) involves finding workarounds to intractable problems and improvements to methods that are not as productive as they could be.

I’ve always been good at solving popular puzzles and games. I enjoy the satisfaction of meeting these recreational challenges accurately and faster than the next guy. With my natural inclination to analyze problems and the frustration I found with this game, I had to look closer at what I was missing.

Looking heuristically at the standard method of play, I discovered some fundamentals that are not discussed in the puzzle pages of newspapers or magazines (where most people first experience this pastime). Even in books of sudoku puzzles (that typically provide some fundamentals of the game) there were gaps. So I developed a grid-marking system that changed sudoku-solving for me. I believe it will change how you regard sudoku-solving from now on.

In short, if you have been frustrated by your lack of progress in getting your arms around sudoku, it is not your fault. You have been short-changed by insufficient instructions AND reasonable inferences you might have drawn from sudoku publications that give the impression that only Answers are worth noting.

For instance, there is no mention (in virtually all of these sudoku publications) of how to record the important information from deductions made about remaining possible Answers (or Candidates) when Answers aren’t forthcoming. Yet, if individual Candidate Status is not remembered or recorded when discovered (or updated), then solvers face the tedium of performing many earlier analyses…again and again. This unnecessary taxing of one’s memory rather than focusing on the next logical step, quite simply, is what had taken the fun out of the game for me.

With the four simple marks of Sudoglyphics™, you will be able to discover the fun of solving these puzzles and finding the satisfaction of completing the most difficult ones faster than you might have imagined (despite your level of experience).

The Basics of the Game

Sudoku is a game that is completed when all Answer Frames of the solving grid (containing eighty-one Answer Frames) are filled correctly with each Digit (1 through 9) nine times. Each clued-or-solved Answer serves triple-duty as being the only instance of its entered Digit in the three, nine-Frame Groups (a 3x3 Block, a 9x1 Row, and 1x9 Column) that any one Answer Frame shares.

A properly completed Sudoku requires several unerring steps of applied logic. The clued and solved Answers AND the remaining Candidate Answers for particular Frames determined still to be viable (but not indisputable) eventually become the premises for subsequent deductions. Don’t guess! The impact of an incorrect guess is unforgiving. Building a string of otherwise perfectly reasoned deductions based upon a single bad premise compounds the error. Typically, an incorrect entry reveals itself only when the puzzle is near completion (with a slew of other incorrect entries in between that discovery and the original error).

The reason for this narrative is that the introduction to solving with the standard sudoku layout needs improvement. The improved understanding begins by identifying specific parts of the standard layout that are hidden in the 81-Frame design, but were never intended to be leveraged by the puzzle’s designers. The reference here is to the set of 729 Spots (nine Spots for each of the eighty-one Frames). These added Spots need not be printed to make the standard layout a useful tool, but they have to be imagined easily, if not seen directly to place and make sense of the annotations discussed shortly.

This is simpler than it sounds, but requires that you become acquainted with a few new terms and navigational references (that won’t be found in other sudoku tracts) that will help you pinpoint the puzzle components analyzed and discussed in the illustrated steps that follow.

Note: There is a Glossary at the end for terms you might want to review after they have been introduced.

Navigating the Grid

Nine Block Groups arranged in the same pattern as the three-wide-by-three-deep Frames they contain, comprise the standard sudoku layout. Note that this same pattern of squares can be found on the typical, telephone keypad for the digits: 1 (upper-left); 2 (upper-middle); 3 (upper-right); 4 (middle-left); 5 (center); 6 (middle-right); 7 (lower-left); 8 (lower-middle); and 9 (lower-right).

Figure a. Blocks and Frames will be referenced by their location’s number within their individual groupings corresponding to the digits 1 through 9 on a telephone keypad.

TAS_0002_Fig_a.jpg

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