The Annotated Sudoku

About the Book

The Annotated Sudoku uses a simple marking system called Sudoglyphics, which builds a path for beginning, experienced, and expert solvers to discover the joy of successfully taking on even the most difficult puzzles and completing them faster than they might have thought possible. The method specifically records and updates the status of every possible answer that remains after an analysis has been performed. The constant marking keeps the solver more engaged between answers. Meanwhile, the accumulation of these marks build visual patterns that otherwise must be created and juggled in memory until they are needed to restart solving where others will most likely get stuck. Included in the book is a step-by-step illustrated explanation for solving a complete, expert-level puzzle using the simple tools and strategies discussed. Regardless of your experience, you can learn to take on the sudoku challenge at the highest level and perform faster without needlessly taxing your memory or backtracking.

About the Author

The author is an Ivy League graduate and a Big-4 Process Improvement consultant who was actually horrible at sudoku for an unmentionable period of time. However, he is tenacious about mental challenges, asks questions, records answers, and looks for what is missing (or not adequately explained) in everything he does at work and at play. So clearly, sudoku was a great place to start. He felt strongly that the joy of solving the more difficult puzzles was compromised by a lack of instructions discussing the importance of recording the ever-changing status of possible answers, not just recording indisputable ones. Further, with no apparent place to record this important information, solvers would have to remember the status of hundreds of tidbits they had deduced already (and if forgotten, they would be consigned to reperforming many of those analyses). Tedious. He felt that this unnecessary taxing of one’s memory rather than focusing on the next logical step, quite simply, took the fun out of the game. Which is why he created Sudoglyphics. Equipped with these simple marks, their placement and their subsequent use, anyone interested in solving sudoku or solving better may do so without backtracking. Now, he solves the most difficult puzzles (at the back of the best sudoku collections) in twelve to twenty minutes routinely.