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Sorry, multiple questions.

 
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n00b

Joined: 08 Oct 2005
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 11:28 am    Post subject: Sorry, multiple questions. Reply with quote

First off, this forum is great, I've read through a good few posts and like the input given.

I'm starting on a sudoku game for the mobile phone through j2me. Since I'm starting out and would like a little bit more information about techniques for the mobile phone - I would like to know if I'm correcting in assuming that brute force for the mobile phone isn't really viable.

Also I'd like to hear what you think of multiple views for the game on the mobile phone. I will be using an emulator to play the game at the start but hope to have it useable on the mobile phone. Mobile phone screens are too small most of the time so here is what I think:

A main view; shows the whole 9x9 grid - you can navigate through the grid, press 5(or something) and select to input a number.

Row view, column view and 3x3 view - Since it is handy to input your own "possible entry" (ie for this particular box it could be 3,4,6,7) numbers I think these popup screens will be needed as the main view cannot handle this amount of number.

To start off with I'm thinking of doing up the sudoku game with predefined puzzles and given answers, then going onto the whole random puzzle generation.

Its a project that I have decided to do so I'm hoping that the whole thing won't be too hard and that I'll have it up and running.

Any answers/advice/tips/questions would be greatly appreciated.
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n00b

Joined: 08 Oct 2005
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 4:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

no replys: ok here is what I think of my questions:
Quote:
brute force for the mobile phone isn't really viable

Not a good option as phone wouldn't have the processing power to invoke such a big process. I'm better off going thru the problem solving methods.

Quote:
multiple views for the game on the mobile phone
Multiple views are fine but have to be tested alot because they can take away from the games playability - I must also take into account that a lot of mobile phones vary in screen size, so the application will have to be scaleable.

Quote:
To start off with I'm thinking of doing up the sudoku game with predefined puzzles and given answers, then going onto the whole random puzzle generation.
- I reckon still this is the best route to go down as I'll have something to work from/start with once the game has its look and feel.

Quote:
Its a project that I have decided to do so I'm hoping that the whole thing won't be too hard and that I'll have it up and running.

I've seen a site where a good game of sudoku was developed by a team over 1 year, so I'm under no illusions that this will be extremely hard.

Any ideas?
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UmberGryphon

Joined: 05 Oct 2005
Posts: 8
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:21 pm    Post subject: Re: Sorry, multiple questions. Reply with quote

n00b wrote:
I would like to know if I'm correcting in assuming that brute force for the mobile phone isn't really viable.


Those of us that are trying to write the fastest possible solvers are pretty close to brute force. Most of the people writing non-brute-force solvers are either trying to write a solver that can determine how hard a puzzle will be for a human, or because they find brute force solvers un-elegant.

So you might want to go the non-brute-force way not because it's faster, but because it lets you randomly generate "easy" puzzles by only giving the user puzzles that can be solved using the easy methods.

n00b wrote:
A main view; shows the whole 9x9 grid - you can navigate through the grid, press 5(or something) and select to input a number.


Maybe on the main view, you can hit star and then a number to highlight all the cells that could hold that number. That's my favorite feature of Simple Sudoku, which has a great user interface.

n00b wrote:
Row view, column view and 3x3 view - Since it is handy to input your own "possible entry" (ie for this particular box it could be 3,4,6,7) numbers I think these popup screens will be needed as the main view cannot handle this amount of number.


I agree that you'll have to do that because of limited screen real-estate, but how are you going to do the row one? Display the row in a 3-by-3 box as if it was one of the 9 sub-boxes? As three 3-box rows with arrows connecting them?

UmberGryphon
(who wonders if Simple Sudoku will ever be ported to any other platform)
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Lardarse

Joined: 06 Sep 2005
Posts: 11
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Location: Bristol, UK

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PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
UmberGryphon
(who wonders if Simple Sudoku will ever be ported to any other platform)

AFAIK, AJ hasn't released the source code, has no plans to release the source code, and hasn't programmed for a non-windows environment before.
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n00b

Joined: 08 Oct 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 9:52 am    Post subject: Re: Sorry, multiple questions. Reply with quote

Quote:
it lets you randomly generate "easy" puzzles by only giving the user puzzles that can be solved using the easy methods.

I didn't know that... I'll have to figure a way how to do easy/medium/difficult puzzles?!?

Quote:
Maybe on the main view, you can hit star and then a number to highlight all the cells that could hold that number. That's my favorite feature of Simple Sudoku, which has a great user interface.

I like that idea, I'll definately try to integrate that one

Quote:
I agree that you'll have to do that because of limited screen real-estate, but how are you going to do the row one? Display the row in a 3-by-3 box as if it was one of the 9 sub-boxes? As three 3-box rows with arrows connecting them?

I intend on having the row go across the top of the screen and then below each space have alternatives that may go into them(vertically).

I've 4/5 months to do the project, I hope I didn't bite off more than I can chew. Thanks for your input UmberGryphon.
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Lummox JR

Joined: 07 Sep 2005
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 3:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Most puzzle generators use an algorithm called dancing links to quickly tell if a sudoku grid is soluble and has just one solution, and use that information to add or delete clues. This will usually turn out easy puzzles (a little less than half the time), but will also show a wide range (with perhaps no upper limit) of difficulty for the others.

If you're trying to generate for a particular difficulty level, the easiest way seems to be to generate a bunch of puzzles and prune the ones you don't want.

In mass-market terms, "very hard" puzzles generally require no more than naked/hidden subsets and an occasional X-wing, maybe even a swordfish. A medium puzzle might use pointing pairs or box-line intersections at worst, and a regular "hard" puzzle might just have one or two subsets to find. The bad news is, puzzles with this sort of layout are uncommon. If you want to find one with swordfish, you'll have to search through roughly 100-200 random puzzles. Because of the limited processing power of phones you may want to do some puzzle generation during the game itself, to have more on hand for each difficulty level.

You'll need a human-style solver for this, too, for rating difficulty. Finding singles is pretty easy, and pointing pairs and box-line intersections are also not hard--particularly if you use the setup from the dancing links algorithm to your advantage. Subsets are fairly easy to find with bit flags, if you have more than 8 bits to work with, and the same logic will also find X-wings and swordfish. For a phone-based sudoku game, that's about the best your solver will be able to do.
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