DABlog

I’m a sort of mediocre good sudoku solver—flashes of brilliance, too lazy to bother writing in all the possible values of each field so not in the running to solve a lot of the harder puzzles. But I enjoy them, and I go through phases of doing them quite a bit.

I also do crosswords—specifically, British-style cryptic crosswords. I’m quite good at those. I rarely finish one completely, but I still consider myself good at them because I often come within, say, two or three clues of finishing. And if the answer is something I’ve never heard of, I give myself partial credit, so to speak.

It’s actually the answers that I’ve been thinking about: the answers to crossword clues, and the answers to Sudoku.

When you work on a crossword clue, there’s a very specific goal for that clue. Clues can be fun, even in isolation. You can work on a crossword puzzle with someone else, even someone who can’t see the puzzle; you just give them a clue, and tell them how many letters you’ve already got, and they can work on it.

Sudoku are different. You can’t really say to your friend, “I’ve got a square that’s missing 2,8, and 9. The blank boxes are the center, the top right, and the middle left” and expect your friend to come up with a solution.

And after you’ve worked on a crossword puzzle – more to the point, after you’ve given up – you want to see the solution. When you see the answers to the clues you didn’t get, you may feel stupid or you may feel vindicated (if you decide the clue was bad, or the answer was something you truly never would have been able to come up with).

That’s where I wonder about Sudoku. You always get the solutions in the back of Sudoku books, or published the next day in the newspaper. But why, exactly? I can’t imagine working on a Sudoku, failing to complete it, and then looking at the third box from the left in the middle row of squares and saying, “Oh, of course! Seven!” The individual squares just don’t have the same relation to their answers that crossword clues have to theirs.

Another kind of weird thing about the solutions to Sudoku is that, at least if you put yourself in the right frame of mind, seeing them doesn’t matter. If I set out to solve a Sudoku rigorously – with no guessing, never filling in a box until I’m sure about it – having access to the solution doesn’t really make my job any easier.

What all of this amounts to is, I think, that the culture of puzzle publication dictates that solutions accompany puzzles, but not too closely (at the back of the book, or a day later), even though this way of doing it is a rather odd fit, in some respects, for Sudoku. No harm done, of course. I just find it kind of funny.