
However, there are some guidelines regarding difficulty: All the newspapers will have their different names for Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard categories and once you get used to what that means for a particular newspaper, those categories will seem pretty consistent. There is no clear reason why a standard was never developed, but it likely has to do with the way Sudoku solving methods were discovered since 2005- in a rather haphazard, disorganized way with people often giving different names to the same method.

To answer your question directly: There is no standard grading system and the relative terms used, easy, medium, hard, tough, super-tough, diabolical, evil and all the rest, only will make any sense for each particular puzzle source ie. Is the only way to make a puzzle harder is to increase the advanced technique requirement count? Is that all that goes into difficulty definition? Which brings up a big followup question i have. Is there any sort of standard to rate puzzles? Programs seem to assign points for technique requirements more chains more points. One goal I have is to be able to solve daily sudokus or newpaper sudokus friends or co-workers may throw at me.
#DIABOLICAL SUDOKU MEANING SOFTWARE#
Do people copmlete those crazy hard type puzzles on paper, or are those designed to be done with software aid? Not necessarily a hint system, but things like filters and auto-candidating. I just want to be able to tell how proficient i'm getting. I've tried a number of generators and that adventure told a similar story, Diabolical puzzles to one program are medium to another. Hodoku seems to be the mosy powerful/useful to me. It just seems like everything i'm finding is either super-simple, or labeled hard yet rather simple, or labeled hard and are CRAZY hard (loops, chanis, franken-fish, etc).Īnother way of getting puzzles is thru generation with one of my choice solvers (Simple Sudoku, Hodoku, and Sadman). The only remotely evil aspect is you run out of hidden singles kind of early.Īs i've been searching for a good source of puzzles (especially ones i can just paste into Simple Sudoku or Hodoku) for further technique practice and fun, I do find some hard ones too. This example is labeled evil, yet only requires nothing more than some locked candidates to solve. There is no author or title page to this so it could have been someone who generated a bunch of puzzles and compiled a pdf.

It has 4 classes of difficulty easy, medium, hard and evil. Hardly as scary as the title first had me believe.Ī co-worker gave me an ebook/pdf of 6400 sudoku puzzles with solutions. It's introduction states, "this book consists of 300 puzzles of super-tough difficulty."Īs you can see, this example requires only a handful of locked candidates, nothing more complex. As i search for a good source of puzzles,it seems to me a lot of puzzless ratings does not match their complexity.Ī book from my bookshelf titled " Second Degree Black Belt Sudoku" by Frank Longo. My past experience has been limited to pencil and paper without solvers or hint software. I have expanded my collection of sudoku techniques recently. A) How are newspaper/online-daily puzles rated for difficulty? Are they rated by the same method?ī) Is the only way to make a puzzle harder is to increase the advanced technique requirement count?
