The Three (Sudoku) Musketeers
A nice case of solving a sudoku with what we know is not true, rather than what we know is true. Taken from a game I played not long ago, a medium sudoku, which I wrote about in the Ilusive 6 article as well.
I was trying to complete the entire right sudoku row, and saw that I was
missing the 5,6 and 8 digits. The following image shows what I was
solving for:
Before reading on - let's see if you can place them, or at least some of
them.
Did you get it? Well done sir! Read on to find my solution.
My initial approach
If you are not a first time reader, you know that I first look for other digits of the same kind that can help me determine where my missing digits can go.
I like to go through each digit at a time and not chase them all at
once, so I started with number 5.
These are the options I had to place it in and my initial analysis of is
it was valid or not:
The bottom (red) 5 is not possible because of the 5 in the bottom left box. The other two are good possibilities, but I can't decide which is correct, yet.
Use the unsolvable to solve
So no final decision on the 5 yet, so I continue to explore the 6 and 8,
and easy enough we can see that they both can't be on
the 2nd cell from the bottom:
That leaves us with only one option, placing the 5 in the 2nd cell from the bottom and calling it "another Sudoku challenge solved"
Thank you for reading!
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