How To Play Sudoku
I am not a Sudoku expert but I love playing Sudoku, especially the Sudoku puzzles in the newspapers everyday.I first started playing Sudoku a few years ago when I saw an article in the papers on Sudoku being the latest craze that was sweeping the world. Curious, I started looking for information on the internet about Sudoku. One of the sites that I found had an online Sudoku game and I was hooked from then on. It is actually not difficult to learn how to play Sudoku. The rules are simple enough: every Sudoku game consists of a 9x9 grid that is sub-divided into 3x3 boxes (see picture),
Each of the numbers from 1 to 9 must appear only once in each 3x3 box or block, once in each row and once in each column, e.g., you cannot have two 5’s in a 3x3 box, or two 5’s in a row or two 5’s in a column. The rules are simple but the game can be devilishly difficult.
The more difficult the game, the less numbers are filled in the Sudoku grid. What I do is to put in all the possible answers for each cell and use a method of elimination to determine what the number in the cell should be. However, this method is slow and painful and it takes me a very long time to solve some of the more difficult puzzles.
Later, I found that there are strategies (some with very fancy names) that could be used to solve Sudoku. For example, the X-Chain, Jellyfish or Skyscraper strategies. But the problem is that it is very difficult to learn these strategies just by reading about it, it is possible that you may end up being more confused than ever. For example, look at this description of the strategy of using the X-Wing and other such patterns from a thread on the Sudoku Programmers Forum:
“Look for N columns (2 for X-wing, 3 for the Swordfish, 4 for a Jellyfish, 5 for a Squirmbag) with only two candidate cells for ONE given digit. If these fall on exactly N common rows, and each of those rows has at least 2 candidate cells, then all N rows can be cleared of that digit (except in the defining cells!).”
Hmmm…
That is why I think the best way to learn how to play Sudoku is to watch how someone solves it. And unless you live with a Sudoku expert so that you can watch over his or her shoulders, the other best alternative is to learn from videos that teach us how to play Sudoku using these strategies. And after learning these techniques, just practise and practise to hone your skills in using these strategies.