Talk:Hypersudoku

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Could some body tell me what needs cleaning up? This a fairly straightforward logic article about how to play a logic game. Is there something you don't like about hypersudoku? Has it become illegal to disseminate this information in public recently? What is it that needs changing? cmccus01 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.184.35.23 (talk • contribs)

Clean up... like the spelling is poor, the wording is poor, the capitalization is poor. It all needs to be copy edited, rewritten and just basically cleaned up to meet minimum Wikipedia standards.

Quite in addition to that is whether the topic deserves an article of its own instead of just a brief mention on the Soduku article.

Also, considering that the person who added the info here is clearly the same person who earlier added images to the main article (and several spam links which were removed, but that's beside the point) about HyperSudoku, and those images included a puzzle which was unsolvable because it did not meet the rules for a correctly-assembled HyperSudoku puzzle, we also need to make sure that the basic info and examples here are even correct. DreamGuy 14:04, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

And none of the six examples provided demonstrate using the extra four boxes in Hypersudoku for solving the puzzle -- only regular Sudoku solving methods are shown. Travholt 11:34, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the feed back. I will work on cleaning this page up. The puzzle viewed in this example has only one solution as do all the puzzles I create. Good point though, I will include some examples were the overlayed squares are the key to solving another square. Is there a preference toward American or English spelling?

Thank you for letting me know, all I need is a little feedback. cmccus01. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 58.168.25.1 (talk) 11:58, August 22, 2007 (UTC)

Contents 1 Many reasons to delete 1.1 Copyright 1.2 Notability 1.3 Spam 1.4 Aside: hypersudoku.com 1.5 Summary

[edit] Many reasons to delete

[edit] Copyright

This page is very nearly a word-for-word duplicate of the "Learn" page of hypersudoku.com, which is explicitly copyright BBR 2006. There are formatting changes, and a few trivial edits; otherwise, the only difference is that the last sentence "If you would like to try playing a game just click on this link" is replaced with the two sentences "To play a game just go to hypersudoku.com. This site will require javascript to be enabled in your browser."

Some of the images are also bit-for-bit the same as those on that page, including the "Welcome to hypersudoku.com" headers; the rest are just cropped versions of the images on that page. The author claims here that they're in the public domain, but the original site still claims that they're copyrighted, which I'm pretty sure invalidates his release.

Reply - These images are public domain. Please view - http://hypersudoku.com/GameBuilder/gameLogic.php —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cmccus01 (talk • contribs) 01:29, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Notability

In brief, hypersudoku appears to be a non-notable name for a not-particularly-notable sudoku variant.

First, I don't see any reason why this variant is more notable than the dozens of others that don't have articles. If the author, or someone else, can challenge that with acceptable references, that would be sufficient to have at least an article on this variant--although not necessarily with this name, and almost certainly not with the current text.

Second, even if the variant is notable, the name doesn't seem to be. Published articles on this variant, and other mentions on Wikipedia, generally refer to it as "NRC sudoku." The web page that's linked from the Mathematics of Sudoku table entry (linked from this article) does not mention the name "hypersudoku." Searching for the name "hypersudoku" on Google reveals nothing relevant but copies of, blog-links to, or reviews of the linked website, or this article itself. Unless the site is notable for some reason, the name isn't notable in itself. (Given that there don't seem to be any major conflicting meanings that show up, it seems reasonable to have a redirect from Hypersudoku if an NRC Sudoku page exists, however.)

Reply - NRC is a dutch newspaper and every Saturday they publish a hypersudoku witch they call NRC sudoku. One game maker calls this variant windoku. The only freely playable, online "hypersudoku/windoku/NRC sudoku" games are hypersudoku.com and the New York Times.

Is the site itself notable? By the usual Wikipedia guidelines, I don't think so. I can't find any qualified-verifiability references to it. Its page rank is pretty low, as are the top pages that link to it. The fact that it's babelfish-translated is also not a great sign. Frankly, it's not even a particularly good Sudoku site, but see below on that tangent.

Reply - This was the very first freely playable online game of this variation. It was followed several months later by the "New York Times" site. It is a simple number game and can be played by people that do not read or speak english. You may not personally like Babelfish but this allows thousands of people in Europe to play the game. All buttons are renamed in the chosen language of the users browser. This game is currently being played daily in 66 countries including China, Japan, Korea and many countries from Africa, South America and the middle east.

[edit] Spam

The entire purpose of this article seems to be to advertise the site hypersudoku.com. Other than a one-sentence introduction, the entirety of the article is a how-to-play guide tailored specifically for one site's implementation (not surprising; see Copyright above), followed by a link to that site.

Also note that the site in question refers to the variant as "hyper-sudoku" but to the site as "hypersudoku," and yet this article is named without the hyphen, a clear sign that it was intended as an ad.

The sum total of the non-spam information here is the followed fractured sentence fragment:

Also known as "hyper-sudoku", "hyper sudoku", "NRC sudoku", "windoku" or four square sudoku" is another variant of sudoku.

Reply - "Hypersudoku", "Hyper Sudoku", "Hyper-Sudoku", "Windoku" and even "NRC Sudoku" are all names referencing the same game as far as I can see. These could all be referenced on the page if you think it would help?

To help the author: First, explain exactly what makes this variant different from standard sudoku--the four extra squares add additional constraints that make otherwise-ambiguous sudokus uniquely solvable. You can use your existing example to help; if attacked as a standard sudoku, R4C2, R4C7, R6C2, and R6C7 can each be either 6 or 8. Does that make it harder or easier or more interesting to solve, generate puzzles for, etc. in any way? Go into the mathematics--is it known how many legal sudokus are/are not legal NRC sudokus, and vice versa? Which of the human and computer solving algorithms are appropriate? Some of this information is presumably in the Brouwer page mentioned earlier. A link to that page, or any other page with such details, would also be helpful. Finally, it's probably worth briefly going over the history of this variant, presumably starting with NRC.

Reply - In the entry level or easy level games the extra squares may only help solve a couple of squares, but in the medium, hard and extra hard levels the extra 4 squares hold the only path to its unique solution. There are many keys held in these extra four over lapping 3 x 3 squares. The game used in this particular articles' example is an entry level beginners game.

[edit] Aside: hypersudoku.com

Part of the reason I find it hard to believe that the site is notable is that, other than its focus on this variant, it's not a very good Sudoku site.

The first problem is the puzzle collection (or generator?). I played 10 puzzles. Six were legal sudokus that were human-solvable without any recourse to the overlay squares, four trivially (e.g., by pysdk, or by entering them at brainbashers.com and clicking "auto pencil" and "find pinned" over and over). One more was a legal sudoku solvable by Knuth's algorithm, but I don't know whether's it's human solvable. Two of the remainder could (like the example given here) be reduced to a single ambiguous square using trivial Sudoku techniques. Only one was really an interesting example (from a playability standpoint) of an NRC sudoku.

Reply - These games you played were all easy level games from the front page of hypersudoku.com. These are all humanly playable games with one unique out come. The easy level games are to build strength of memory and deudtion skills so you don't need a pencil (you can print them out if you like). As you strengthen your deduction and memory skills you can move on to higher levels and play them with speed and accuracy.

The second problem is the interface. Most seriously, the interface draws the entire solution before erasing squares, which pretty much takes away all of the challenge. Beyond that, mouse entry (which requires a click, a very precise mouse movement, and another click) is clunky and slow. Keyboard entry (which requires a click and movement out of the popup hit area) is painful. There's no way to pencil in or rule out partially-solved squares, so if the puzzles actually were difficult, it would probably be necessary to solve them on paper or in another application just to come back and enter the answers. Finally, instead of the kind of useful hint features that most sites provide, there's just a "clue" button that seems to fill in a random square. Compare the interface to popular sites like Gamehouse, WebSudoku.com, BrainBashers.com, DailySudoku.com, or any of the other top search hits for "sudoku" to see what I mean.

Reply - Obviously you personally don't like the game hypersudoku and you certainly don't like the site hypersudoku.com. Games produced by hypersudoku.com are published in newspapers (or should that be news-papers)and magazines on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Hypersudoku.com serves 1,000+ games a week online at this point in time (2nd Jan, 2008). About 10 - 15 visitors a month come from wikipedia. I'm sure the "New York Times" serves at least a similar amount from their site. This article is not spam it is purely information for the players, whether online or playing from a newspaper. The only published free online games of this variant are not called NRC sudoku, windoku, four square sudoku or any other name, they are hypersudoku.

[edit] Summary

I don't think this page has any reason to exist; it's a poorly written, non-wikipedia-style, non-GFDL-able spamvert for a non-notable name (which happens to be identical to the name of the author's website) for not-particularly-notable Sudoku variant, with no useful information.

It might be possible to verify that NRC sudoku is notable; if so, write a proper article on it. If this name is not the most widely-used name, but it not completely unknown, add a redirect from hypersudoku to that article. If the site itself is notable, describe it and add a link. But my guess is that there's nothing worth keeping here. --75.36.135.39 (talk) 10:26, 19 December 2007 (UTC)