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Comment by lucw | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any thoughts on what motivates people to play sudoku or write solvers for sudoku ? I have trouble finding motivation to solve artificial problems. That said I sink hundreds of hours into factorio.

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For me personally, I have little motivation to do classical sudokus. They either have a not-so-elegant solve path (usually set by a computer) or are too difficult for me to solve.

Variant sudokus on the other hand are a lot of fun. They often have very elegant solve paths and there are many neat tricks you can discover and reason about.

Some fun ones, if you'd like to try:

- https://logic-masters.de/Raetselportal/Raetsel/zeigen.php?id...

I also mostly enjoy Sudoku variants, most of which I discovered via Geocaches, interestingly. After solving a few I then implemented a solver with customizable constraints, if anyone's interested, should still be available here:

https://www.sudoku-solver.ch/

To each their own, but the puzzles you linked seem really convoluted compared to regular Sudoku.

The last puzzle has no fewer than 9 custom rules, in addition to the regular Sudoku rules, and then it also says “every clue is wrogn [sic]” implying there is some meta out-of-the-box thinking required to even understand what the rules are. That is more a riddle than a logic puzzle.

By contrast, the charm of classical Sudoku is that the rules are extremely simple and straightforward (fill the grid using digits 1 through 9, so that each digit occurs exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box) and any difficulty solving comes from the configuration of the grid.

Like many puzzles, there’s a regular release of endorphins as you progress, and a lot of satisfaction in completing something. I enjoy puzzles just like reading a book or playing a game, it’s another world I can step into for a bit of an escape, but I like to think it’s decent mental exercise. Overall I vastly prefer cryptic crosswords where solving each clue genuinely brings a smile to my face, but that’s more of a commitment of time (and for me sometimes a guarantee of frustration). I also like doing puzzles in the newspaper because me and my kids can sit together and all contribute. Coffee, breakfast, sat in the sun with a newspaper and a good pencil[1], absolute bliss if you ask me.

As for solvers, it’s a very elegant, well-formed problem with a lot of different potential solutions, many of which involve useful general techniques. I used to dabble clumsily in chess engines and honestly it’s the only time I’ve ever ended up reading Knuth directly for various bit twiddling hacks, so it’s always educational.

1: https://musgravepencil.com/products/600-news-wood-cased-roun...

I don't particularly enjoy sudoku but I like word puzzle games.

They're all artificial problems, but your brain likes a challenge and you get a dopamine hit when you solve it, I suppose.

All games are artificial problems, so your question actually is, what motivates people to engage in pastimes?

Sudoku, crosswords, Simon Tatham's puzzles etc. are an excellent way to pass the time while keep training the mind. Sports are their equivalent for the body.

Finally, writing solvers for a problem, be it real or artificial, for many is just another variety of puzzle to engage in.

idk man, you ask a good question. I think the idea has to do with the saddle you put on the invisible horse that is the game’s problem. Factorio has several complex saddles you must master to tame the beast. In factorio, you can get progressively better at using these saddles to tame even the most unwieldy scenario. Sudoku, at its heart, is not much different than factorio. However sudoku has one narrow problem with many different, increasingly nuanced ways of solving it. Factorio has many different “sudoku” style problems, but each problem needs to be handled differently, with each problem having increasing levels of sophistication. I think you might like factorio more because it’s just a bigger steak to chew on, and you’ve got the right appetite.

I don’t care much for sudoku but I do enjoy crosswords quite a lot, which feels like a somewhat arbitrary exercise. I enjoy the fact that I know a lot of words and it makes me feel clever. There’s probably something to that with most puzzle type challenges.

I wasted too much time in my youth trying to min-max, and now I get bored as soon as I figure out, roughly, what the rules and mechanics look like for any game.

I teach C++ and I made my students code a Sudoku solver last year. It's a very convenient project to give them: self-contained, already familiar, no OS-specific weirdness, you get to use STL data structures, algorithms, very gentle I/Os...

Normally I would concur, but I recently fell into a klondike solitaire binge and the only way out was to write a solver.

I play sudoku almost exclusively on the plane. It's a good way to lose 5-15min.

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