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Liquified Sudoku

Liquified Sudoku

This is Part 2 of Sudoku Media testing. (See the Will it Blend? Cartoon on August 5, 2007). Perhaps because I have acquired a bad cold does this particularly appeal to me. It’s hard to maintain the clarity to do a sudoku puzzle. Frustration abounds. Ergo, the ultimate solution.

My thanks to Vlad Balan who runs free-sudoku-games.net, which provides daily puzzles of varying difficulty along with Sudoku related news and a community page, which shows the twisted sudoku picture encircled.

I’m going to rest my cold now and look for a better day tomorrow.

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Rotational Sudoku

Rotational Sudoku

That is the question, as Tom Dickson of Blendtec Blender Video Fame often asks. The link shows a short video clip of an iPhone being put to that question. Due to budgetary and technical limitations, I am only willing to show pictorially how a Sudoku Board gets brought to its numerical knees.

I hope you all enjoy this as much as I did while creating it.

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Sudoku + Paint By Numbers

Sudoku + Paint By Numbers

For me, before I discovered Sudoku there was Paint By Numbers (Nonograms). I was particularly fascinated by painting (shading actually) logically. There are three books of Paint By Numbers Puzzles that I’m aware of: one is authored by Games Magazine, called Paint By Numbers and the other two are by Kathy Weaver, called Art Puzzles By Number and More Art Puzzles By Number.

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Flickr Sudoku

A visually interesting mashup of Sudoku and Flickr involving pictures of numbers is shown in Flickr Sudoku. This is an online playable game, (although rendering for the Safari 1.3.2 browser is flawed at the bottom).

Unfortunately, the presentation reminds me of a numerical ransom note. This is not to minimize the great work that went into creating this site. I also like the various (random) Sudoku keyword searches on Google shown at the top. There’s a Time of Day Site called Human Clock that has found and created objects/photos with the correct hour and minute that uses a similar idea.

A more abstract version of the same concept is shown on Becky’s Web where 9 thematically grouped pictures and a blank picture are shown in a playable grid. Like the large varieties of layouts in Mah Jong Solitaire Software Puzzles, the original chinese characters are transformed into various alternative symbol sets.

I believe it is a good idea, when exercising the brain, to expose it to a variety of “settings” or contexts in which puzzle solving logic can be applied. The brain embraces the novelty and adapts to a more flexible solving environment.

Thanks to Webmaster for letting me know about these sites.