Diagonal Vision Author
Posts: 337
 
Location: Switzerland | Just a few words (I don't plan to be very active on this subject in the future, as I think I've said almost everything I wanted to say in the past few years).
In my opinion, both characterisations "non-repetition" and "inclusion" are equally important, and both ARE important. I'm surprised to read that some people make a hierarchy between those, I never heard it before.
On a philosophical plan, I don't see any reason to say that a puzzle which hasn't these 2 characteristics is a sudoku.
On the other side, if we want to allow these puzzles into sudoku competition, I think we should be more precise about the definition of deficit and surplus sudoku.
While I'm not annoyed by "standard" deficit/surplus, I mean deficit having N+1 deficit regions containing each N-1 cells and surplus having N-1 surplus regions containing each N+1 cells (Well, I've to say that I personally prefer when these puzzles are smaller than 9*9). I would be unhappy to see the processus pushed to extreme: I already said it's crucial for me that regions cover the whole grid (or almost the whole grid), I would add that a 9*9 deficit sudoku having 27 deficit regions of 3 cells or 9*9 surplus sudoku having 3 big regions of 27 cells would be far from what I expect a sudoku should be (but isn't contradictory with deficit/surplus definition and doesn't break more characteristic of classic sudoku than "standard" deficit/surplus sudoku, apart from size of regions being far from number of symbols to be placed).
Again, I think it's the responsibility of the WPF/organizers/authors to say which kind of puzzles are called sudoku, if it exceeds largely what is commonly accepted by everybody (and I mean everybody, not everybody in the puzzle community, as we are speaking here about a World Championship, not only an annual tournament of puzzle enthousiasts). Still waiting the WPF to say a single word on this subject...
Of course, this is again only my personal opinion.
Fred |
WSPC 2017 • Schedule • Participation • Location • WSC • WPC • Contact •Search •Recent
What is a Sudoku
