[HN Gopher] A new Sudoku layout with 81 uniquely shaped cells
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A new Sudoku layout with 81 uniquely shaped cells
Author : dmit
Score : 80 points
Date : 2025-03-13 01:04 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (danielchasehooper.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danielchasehooper.com)
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I'll give it a shot, but IMHO while the logic of "runs" isn't
| super complex, it is way too hard to see at a glance and so I
| don't see myself giving much time to this.
| jsnell wrote:
| Yeah. It's an original idea, but it just doesn't feel playable
| at all.
|
| I feel that this sentence from the blog post should have made
| some alarm bells ring:
|
| > Sometimes I fall back on selecting cells randomly until I
| find one with highly constraining runs.
|
| Clicking through individual cells one by one sounds really
| tedious, but this also makes it clear that playing through
| puzzles doesn't build up some ability to see the runs at a
| glance.
|
| I think the only way you make this work is by eliminating the
| concept of run being entirely determined by the board layout.
| There would need to be way fewer (mostly longer) lines, they
| should always be visible, and they should be set up by the
| puzzle constructor to be interesting rather than with purely a
| mechanical rule.
| dhooper wrote:
| OP Here, I'll try drawing all non-redundant lines, see if it
| feels better. UPDATE: done. give it a shot.
| jsnell wrote:
| It's an improvement, playble enough that I finished a
| puzzle.
|
| It still wasn't particularly engaging though, but a purely
| mechanical exercise in pencilmarking and ticking off the
| obvious conflicts. It's answering the question of "could
| you have an irregular layout" rather than "what kind of
| interesting puzzles can you design only with an irregular
| layout". There was not a single "oh, wait, this ruleset
| actually also implies _X_ " deductive leap, no place where
| it felt like there was some cool emergent property of the
| ruleset.
| lanthade wrote:
| I agree. I played one game and it was more frustrating/annoying
| than satisfying. I just didn't find it enjoyable and I usually
| find hard sudoku pretty enjoyable. The run rule makes sense but
| it just didn't get any more intuitive the longer I played.
| angry_moose wrote:
| It's an interesting idea but I really don't like it.
|
| The runs not being visible makes it a really unsatisfying
| experience - you just kindof click around hoping that a cell is
| part of a long run (and therefore more constrained).
|
| Most runs are length 2-3 as well and entirely within the the same
| "region", so are therefore redundant as they're already
| constrained by box logic.
|
| Nice idea but its a miss for me.
| dhooper wrote:
| OP Here, I'm gonna try drawing all non-redundant lines to see
| if it improves the feel. UPDATE: done.
|
| I will say that it took time for me to develop an intuition for
| where to focus solving efforts. I think if people spend a
| little time with it you wont have to click around as much to
| know where the next break in is.
| angry_moose wrote:
| I think it would, though there is a risk it'd be too
| cluttered visibly. But it does add the option of printing
| which is nice.
|
| Looking at your example puzzle with all lines visible; the
| 8742 line in the top right and 896 in the bottom right are
| both redundant (second one doubly so since it's all givens).
| Maybe 50% of the two-cell lines are redundant and 33% of the
| 3-cell; so it might be manageable?
| dhooper wrote:
| try it now, I think showing the runs is an improvement. I
| think theres a few more things I can do to improve the
| visuals. I also updated the article to make the rules for
| runs more general - a human could place them anywhere
| they'd like without the even/odd side constraint.
| angry_moose wrote:
| Nice!
|
| I don't have time to do a full solve but I got the first
| few digits. That plays significantly better to me.
| nkrisc wrote:
| An interesting idea that sadly just isn't fun to play.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| I'm not sure Sudoku is really ever _fun_ to play. It 's more of
| a litmus test to see how well you've developed your logic. And
| it can be satisfying when you get a good answer.
| ludsan wrote:
| I think Sudoku can be very fun to play with new rules, when
| you begin thinking in higher abstractions. I'm a big fan of
| anti-knight rules.
|
| I look forward everyday to see what new puzzles are out on
| the Cracking-the-cryptic channel.
|
| IMO, your use of the word 'satisfying' is to me the
| definition of fun!
| macintux wrote:
| Negative constraints like anti-knight significantly improve
| my enjoyment of Sudoku. They make it more likely that
| puzzles don't devolve to straight Sudoku near the end.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I think regular sudoku is fun.
| chungy wrote:
| On my phone, I've got 566 hours logged in 7700 games. I think
| it's fun :)
| jamie_ca wrote:
| Interesting idea, but for clarity the cells need to be smoothed
| to ensure each cell edge has a minimum length.
|
| eg. In the example image the top-left cluster has a given 9,
| where the orange line marking the run goes out to the right at
| what to me looks like a corner.
| dhooper wrote:
| yes, that improvement was implied but not explicitly spelled
| out under future work. I'll update to clarify.
| scarletphoenix wrote:
| Thanks for showing this off!
|
| I played through the daily puzzle:
|
| 1. It was really hard in dark mode to see what I was doing
|
| 2. Scanning was almost impossible without clicking and seeing the
| runs -- so it was mostly fully pencil mark and find pairs and
| triples.
|
| Overall, unique, but I think some further constraints or human-
| setters (as you mentioned) could lead to more intuitive or clever
| paths to a solution.
|
| (Perhaps instead of lines, shade the cells in the runs to avoid
| clutter with borders and writing over numbers)
| dhooper wrote:
| I removed dark mode because it was too hard to make a dark
| color scheme that was as legible as light.
|
| the puzzle now shows all runs all the time.
| tener wrote:
| Lol and I wondered why it came back light after reload. It
| was really fun after you got past the UX hurdles! Pity there
| aren't more online.
| dhooper wrote:
| New puzzle every day! I have thousands queued up!
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I can't explain why but I get anxiety just looking at that.
| johnea wrote:
| Isn't this just sudoku with the squares morphed into irregular
| shapes?
| dhooper wrote:
| No, the irregular shape allows run constraints that wouldn't be
| possible on a grid using rows/columns/lines.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I'm confused, some of the colored lines only go through a few
| cells, shouldn't they all go through 9 of them?
| dhooper wrote:
| "Runs are a strip of 2 to 9 cells"
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Having looked at that, I now have a headache.
| o11c wrote:
| The lack of arrow shortcuts for navigation really throws me off
| (especially since both the mouse and the numpad are normally used
| by the right hand). Although cells have more than 4 neighbors,
| there's still a notion of direction; maybe just break ties by
| what is closer to the previous cell? Or use a subgrid? SGT's
| "bridges" and "map" puzzles may be interesting; the former
| doesn't care about neighbors but the puzzle guarantees indirect
| connectivity somehow, whereas the latter uses a subgrid. "Loopy"
| which has all sorts of shapes just gives up and disables it, even
| though good solutions exist for even for non-square grids :(.
|
| Is your "at most 9" logic preventing loops?
|
| I think I could probably get used to visualizing runs on my own
| if only the shapes weren't so irregular. In particular, the fact
| that there can be apparent "four corners" means it's impossible
| to tell which way the run actually connects; you should probably
| tweak the grid to ensure a minimum edge size (or maybe even
| forcibly align it to an orthogonal-with-diagonals grid? Either
| way, remember you don't need to _stay_ Voronoi). Actually, to
| reduce visual clutter, maybe color the _edges_ rather than the
| lines crossing them? Perhaps make odd-sided polygons blatantly
| different too?
|
| Serious sudoko solvers have at least 2 kinds of pencil markings -
| I find "top" and "bottom" most convenient. Maybe insert an
| underscore at the end of the "active" set of numbers? (or
| overdraw for pen marks). But for puzzles complicated enough to
| need bifurcation, I really just need an arbitrary grid where I
| can put any number at any location in any order - or else an
| option to fork the entire puzzle.
|
| And of course there needs to be a "fill in all pencil marks so I
| can work subtractitively" button.
| dwighttk wrote:
| I guess when I'm solving sudoku I lean on "runs" being all 9 so I
| know which of the 9 go into certain spots
|
| I'm sure I'm not seeing something that lets me advance, but I'm
| just stuck with a lot of cells with two options.
|
| it's also not clear why some "runs" just connect adjacent cells.
| I assumed adjacency (across zones) didn't matter because of that
| but the puzzle warned me when I broke that rule.
| dhooper wrote:
| the 2-cell long runs are explained by this in the article "Runs
| terminate on cells with an odd number of sides"
|
| runs are shown between all adjacent cells.
| dwighttk wrote:
| >That's a confusing explanation for something I hope you
| intuitively understand from the image above.
|
| heh... not quite intuitive to me I guess
|
| my confusion (as best as I can tell through the fog of
| confusion) is that adjacent cells seem to not be allowed to
| have the same number... and also there are a bunch of
| obviously adjacent cells with lines connecting only those two
| cells (but also a lot of obviously adjacent cells with no
| lines connecting them.) Those lines connecting only two
| plainly adjacent cells are confusing me.
| dhooper wrote:
| You don't need to understand the rules for how the
| generator placed the runs to solve, you can just look at
| the runs.
| dwighttk wrote:
| well, I need to understand something to make any
| progress... I'm obviously confused about what I'm
| confused about
| culi wrote:
| It would be mighty helpful to color-code the colored run-lines by
| length
|
| I.e. if red was always 2 cells long, green was always 3, etc
|
| The length of the lines plays a significant role. Especially if
| you get one that's 9 long
| rezmason wrote:
| This was hard, but fun!
|
| One suggestion: make empty spaces visually distinct from filled
| spaces. Why? Because cell 73 in the tenth puzzle (today's) is
| small enough that I completely overlooked it, and used faulty
| logic to deduce all but two spaces before I discovered it. I was
| ready to file a bug report!
|
| I'll meet you halfway-- if you'll please consider my feature
| request, I'll go visit my optometrist. :D
| bbasic wrote:
| I liked it thanks, i thought it was fun to play, i got an
| intuition for things after a while and i found it relaxing.
|
| The instructions took a moment or two to understand for me.
| jfultz wrote:
| Solved, and it was fun! But...some of the colored lines were hard
| to see. Particularly the light yellow ones. I had one "alternate"
| solution that it was marking incorrect for reasons it took me
| over a minute to spot...and it was just a super light yellow line
| I missed without really scrunching up to my screen.
|
| Improving the color choice might help, but slightly thicker lines
| I think would also be of significant help.
|
| Also, it's common for sudoku solvers to allow you to press
| Shift+number to do a one-off toggle for the "note" checkmark.
| moate wrote:
| Hi there!
|
| As someone who's had some amount of professional work on
| games/toys I have bad news: I hate this (it's okay, I hate lots
| of perfectly good things!) from a UI/UX standpoint.
|
| "Nobody has changed the layout of Sodoku..." there might be a
| reason for that. When you're trying to create organized
| lists/sequences, a messy visual is going to be frustrating. The
| geometry/symmetry of a Sodoku is part of the appeal. Think of a
| crossword: does the shape affect the fun? You might see circles
| vs squares, or some people building shapes by arranging the word
| lengths creatively, but nobody is trying to have the across words
| in one column and the down words floating in a nebulous space
| nearby, because that's not a crossword.
|
| What value does this change bring? Why do you think there's more
| fun in the difficult to parse shapes over the clean rows/lines of
| standard sodoku? The changes seem to make it much harder to gronk
| how the game works and provide little added "fun" value. Think of
| it this way: you can play sudoku blindfolded and have someone
| fill the grid in for you. This would make it much more
| challenging (with essentially a UI change like your change) but
| not necessarily more fun for most people because the challenge
| isn't what the game is about. It would be similar to playing
| baseball in ankle deep water, or Halo using a DDR pad: novel and
| quirky, but missing what makes the game compelling in the first
| place.
|
| I think this is a cool thought experiment and a great way to
| illustrate some concepts of game design (sadly, as a way of what
| NOT to do) and for that you should be really proud! Hope you're
| able to take something productive from my post.
| null_name wrote:
| having fun with this. I like the longer runs better but it feels
| kind of crowded, I wonder if you could optimize for fewer+longer?
| also just had the thought you could fit this into arbitrary
| bounding shapes, not just a square...
| null_name wrote:
| completed the day's puzzle! it's a bit hard to keep the runs in
| my head. what if instead of run lines, the polygons had a
| background, like stripes for one run, checkers for another, and
| half/half for ones with both? I don't think this idea is quite
| right, but it might spark something from someone else.. I'm
| colorblind, which may have something to do with how hard it was
| to keep track of the runs. maybe they could be kept as lines,
| but with some as dashes, some dots, some solid, etc?
| Malipeddi wrote:
| This is quite nice! Thank you for sharing it. I think i came here
| after the good feedback had been incorporated. So i did not find
| anything confusing. It was quite fun to solve.
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