That said, having ten levels of difficulty should offer enough distinction between difficulties. If the grading scale used the set of real numbers 0-10 rather than the set of integers 0-10, finer distinctions could be made. Instead the problem is in lack of precision. But these subtle differences between difficulty levels are not an issue of the grader’s accuracy. Were the system more precise, perhaps USA Weekend’s “Easy”, “Medium”, and “Hard” ratings would not grade to 1. Ideally, the proposed grading scale would be better able to differentiate between the news publications’ difficulty levels. Likely an effort to avoid alienating casual Sudoku solvers, only publishing easier puzzles contributes to confusion between the grading scales. This means that such print news publications do not include puzzles requiring strategies more advanced than Hidden Singles. The vast majority of these puzzles had a strategic difficulty score of 0, requiring only Slicing and Slotting and Simple Singles. First of all, every single USA Weekend or Columbus Dispatch puzzle rated had at most a strategic difficult score of one. While other statistical conclusions are difficult to make due to limited sample sizes and unequal variances, it is worth noting some other trends in the data. A puzzle rated “5 of 5” in The Columbus Dispatch is significantly less difficult than a “Difficult” puzzle from or a “Demanding” puzzle from Will Shortz, as confirmed by a two-sample t-test (Appendix B). Also, it is immediately apparent that puzzles written for print news publications tend to be graded on a scale far easier than those available through other means. The data, available in Appendix A has been summarized in Table 1.įirst of all, it is clear that different publications’ grading scales do not line up. Sampling puzzles from each source and running them through Sudoku Grader, a Sudoku grading program written by myself as prescribed in this essay, some interesting patterns emerge in the data. These are two print news publications, a website, and a Sudoku book. Four possible publications to consider are USA Weekend, The Columbus Dispatch,, and The Giant Gift Book of Sudoku by Will Shortz. He has been seizure-free for more than five years.With the standardized grading scale finished, it is time to begin analysis of some of the major news publications’ and Sudoku providers’ grading systems. Not surprisingly, this patient stopped working Sudoku puzzles. “Similar seizures could be elicited by other visual-spatial tasks like sorting random numbers in an ascending order, but not by reading, writing or calculating alone,” they write. So what was going on? Well, the loss of oxygen most likely damaged certain regions of the patient’s brain, the authors write. The seizures “stopped immediately when the Sudoku puzzle was discontinued,” the authors write. That’s when the seizures began.Īs he imagined the puzzles in a three-dimensional manner, he developed clonic seizures, or rapid contractions of the muscles in his left arm. Weeks later, the authors write, the student was trying to solve Sudoku puzzles. The brief twitching of muscles in his mouth and legs was triggered by talking and walking. He subsequently developed myoclonus, or involuntary jerking. The German authors write that a 25-year-old male physical-education student had been buried by an avalanche while skiing and was deprived of adequate oxygen for 15 minutes. Sudoku and other puzzles have been praised as a good way to keep your mind sharp and your brain healthy.īut for one student, the number game was less than helpful in fact, Sudoku triggered his seizures.ĭoctors and researchers described this unusual case on Monday in the journal JAMA Neurology.
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