Friday Puzzle #133 - Low-clue Killer Sudoku

[motris]

A lot of recent sudoku news has focused on the reported proof of 17 being the minimal number of clues needed to specify a unique classic sudoku solution. I haven't had time to look too deeply into the proof yet but at first read it seems to be one of the better pieces of sudoku scholarship to come out since the full counting of solutions done by

Comments

[anonymous]

I enjoyed this, thank you.

Cheers
Rob

[ext_381555]

I think I remember one with less cages, which was posted on the DJApe forum, which has been long gone. This was dubbed a Vanilla Killer as all cages were fixed, so you had no real Killer Sudoku deductions to do. I guess that has to be done if you want to go minimal, just as this one has 9/12 cages fixed.

[motris]

Right. I thought to research the question on djape's old forum first and then remember it, like some other good sudoku forums, is now gone. I will say that while I agree that the "Killer" aspect is lost by fixing cages, I found it interesting that some of the very last cells I could enter were in the 23 on the left. While I knew what 3 numbers go in there, none are fixed until very late in the solve.

Vanilla Killer

[ext_381555]

I remember we used the phrase Vanilla Killer for those with all cages having fixed content.

As I remember udosuk managed to do a 10-cager following your rules.

I do remember that he did a single cager with constraints - although I cannot recall which constraints he used.

HATMAN

[ext_381555]

motris

I forgot to add:

good puzzle; and

congratulations on your victory.

HATMAN

[anonymous]

hey guys

some of you may know me as 999_springs on the new player's forums. i'm Zapmeister on reddit, if you want proof i'll state my username in a comment there. i'd just like to point out

i win

http://redd.it/10az6m

i win

[anonymous]

hey guys

some of you may know me as 999_springs on the new player's forums. i'm Zapmeister on reddit, if you want proof i'll state my username in a comment there. i'd just like to point out

i win

ok your blog seems to be flagging links up as spam, which is totally unneccessary, but here's the url:
http and then redd.it and then 10az6m

i win

[anonymous]

ok it's zapmeister again, sorry for double posting but reddit is being really unhelpful and not showing my submission properly i'll just tell you what my puzzle looks like

x........
xxxx.....
xxxxxxx..
xx.......
xxxxx....
xxxxxxxx.
xxx......
xxxxxx...
xxxxxxxxx

x adds up to 165

one cage ;) :P

if you don't allow repeats you can split the cage into 9 in the obvious way and discard one of them to get an 8 cage killer, but that's boring

Re: i win

[motris]

Posts with links, particularly anonymous posts, don't go through until I moderate.

Your novel cage design reminds me of the same kind of property I exploited here. So a neat example of using the canonical grid with min (or max) sums.