Thread - 12 What Is It?

David McNeill - 2017-10-04 7:29 PM

Rohan,

As the person responsible for setting a WPC instructionless round a few years back, I'm looking forward to this round. I hope I will be permitted to ask some questions in order to determine the search space.

Are we to think about using or combining well-known constraints? Or are we generally thinking about fairly novel constraints? Or both?

Will the grids generally be dressed with shading, lines, internal clues or external clues? Or could we have undressed grids with unmarked adjacent cell/neighbour constraints such as non-consecutive or non-touch? Or unmarked long-range constraints such as mirror or queen?

If this is not a helpful line of questioning, I'm happy to just wait and see.

I thoroughly enjoyed your round in 2014, and I must admit the experience grew on me since then to have it in a WSC some day.

The instructions could be anything, it could be known variants, tweaked versions of existing variants, or completely new variants. We have tested the sudokus with 8-9 different testers with varying levels of sudoku solving experience, and from different backgrounds, languages and countries.

All solved example grids will have some form of dressing (like internal clues, external clues, shaded cells, regions, lines, cages, letters, dots, arrows, etc.), in puzzle and/or solution, so it will be clear where to focus. There won't be a Classic-Lookalike type of variant (like Non-Consecutive or Anti-Knight) nor will there be any variant with multiple forms of dressings / clues (like the Hybrids round). We will add this in the IB.


	@ 2017-10-04 9:55 PM (#23467 - in reply to #23466) (#23467) Top
vopani Posts: 739 Country : India	vopani posted @ 2017-10-04 9:55 PM David McNeill - 2017-10-04 7:29 PM Rohan, As the person responsible for setting a WPC instructionless round a few years back, I'm looking forward to this round. I hope I will be permitted to ask some questions in order to determine the search space. Are we to think about using or combining well-known constraints? Or are we generally thinking about fairly novel constraints? Or both? Will the grids generally be dressed with shading, lines, internal clues or external clues? Or could we have undressed grids with unmarked adjacent cell/neighbour constraints such as non-consecutive or non-touch? Or unmarked long-range constraints such as mirror or queen? If this is not a helpful line of questioning, I'm happy to just wait and see. I thoroughly enjoyed your round in 2014, and I must admit the experience grew on me since then to have it in a WSC some day. The instructions could be anything, it could be known variants, tweaked versions of existing variants, or completely new variants. We have tested the sudokus with 8-9 different testers with varying levels of sudoku solving experience, and from different backgrounds, languages and countries. All solved example grids will have some form of dressing (like internal clues, external clues, shaded cells, regions, lines, cages, letters, dots, arrows, etc.), in puzzle and/or solution, so it will be clear where to focus. There won't be a Classic-Lookalike type of variant (like Non-Consecutive or Anti-Knight) nor will there be any variant with multiple forms of dressings / clues (like the Hybrids round). We will add this in the IB.