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Self Improvement And Fun Games

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Internet Go servers are a perfect place to learn how to play - I would recommend the Kiseido Go Server (KGS), since it has a user friendly interface and a helpful community

Thank you for the wonderful information, I had heard about Go before reading the post but had never really known where to look to get started, your recommendation has helped me to really jump into the process of learning the game and testing my skills and I have now gotten a number of my friends interested in it too.

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If anyone has any tips on completing "evil" puzzles on websudoku period, please let me know.

When all other methods are exhausted, I guess at one of the values.

First, I use the "How am I doing?" button to verify that I have made no mistakes so far and to establish a base-line.

Then I select a cell which can only have two values (if possible) and put one of them into it.

Then I develop all the consequences of that guess.

If it leads to a solution, fine.

If it leads to a contradiction, then I press control-Z (undo) repeatedly until I get back to the base-line (undo will not take you further back); and then put in the other value and proceed from there.

Sometimes I get stuck again before I reach either a solution or a contradiction. This may indicate a poor choice of which value to guess -- in which case one might try going back with control-Z to the base-line and making a guess for a different cell. Or one can do what I usually do, which is assume that everything is OK; and try this method again using the current situation as the new base-line.

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First, I use the "How am I doing?" button to verify that I have made no mistakes so far and to establish a base-line.

.....

If it leads to a contradiction, then I press control-Z (undo) repeatedly until I get back to the base-line (undo will not take you further back);

'How am I doing' button:

Strict - Only tell me about visible mistakes.

Regular - Warn me when a number is wrong.

Helpful - Show me the positions of wrong numbers.

http://www.websudoku.com

I should clarify that one must have selected either the "Regular" or "Helpful" option for the "How am I doing?" button in order to discover all mistakes by pressing that button. (I use the "Helpful" option.)

Control-Z undoes normal entries into the cells of the puzzle. But it will not undo past the pushing of a button. So when doing an exploratory guess, one must take care not to make any presses of the buttons after establishing a base-line, until one has decided whether one's choice was correct or not.

Since the "How am I doing?" button could be used to solve any puzzle no matter how hard (except in the "Strict" option) without figuring it out for one's self, I consider any puzzle where I have gotten a correction from that button to be a puzzle which I failed to solve. How do you guys feel about that?

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http://www.websudoku.com

I should clarify that one must have selected either the "Regular" or "Helpful" option for the "How am I doing?" button in order to discover all mistakes by pressing that button.

Thanks for the tips! I am improving.

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Showoff! :P

Well, Dave, you will be happy to know that I just did a 7:10. My "average" is still around 14, and some of them I just don't finish for various reasons, usually related to my studies, so the average isn't really accurate. Nonetheless, I feel like the journeyman ballplayer who out of nowhere belts four homers in a game. I guess that means I feel like Mike Cameron.

Anyway, it's still on. ;)

[Edit: 6:21. I think all this apartment cleaning is giving me a brain boost. Maybe I should do it more than once a presidential administration. ;) ]

Edited by Groovenstein
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  • 1 month later...

There's an online Boggle game where you can make words and save your results. At the end of the day, you can compare your scores against those of folk from all over. Check the archives section to see what the competition is like.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Yes, I've not been doing much in the last few months as I mentioned in my blog. Ugh. But yes, I've been playing still and I am improving. I have noticed that there was a change in mindset required to get used to the fluidity of the game.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I have tons of fun geometry games, I usually prefer them to language games. Most of them are disentanglement puzzles, and most of those are what are called "tavern puzzles". They're pieces of wire that are bent into some shapes, and they have a key piece that you're supposed to remove from the puzzle with little or no force. I've done the cobra, horseshoes, bent nails, the anomaly and others. I also have a disentanglement puzzle made of six interlocking plastic pieces (if you try these things, beware that disentangling is not the hard part--re-entangling is). And I have three enigma puzzles which are interlocking wood pieces that form neat geometric shapes. With these, there is pretty much no problem taking them apart, the challenge is completely in seeing the final product, taking it apart, and using geometric reasoning to see how to get from your several pieces to a united whole without hammering nails into it.

The only problem I have with some of these puzzles is the price. I always feel like a schmuck paying $8 for pieces of bend metal. But if anybody's interested, here's a good link to a lot of different puzzles. http://www.puzzlesolver.com/list.php?cat=6

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  • 10 months later...

I have recently discovered kakuro which is something of a hybrid sudoku/crossword. Like sudoku, it's all logic. As of now, I find kakuro much more challenging than sudoku. However it's worth noting that (1) I went right out and bought the toughest kakuro book I could find, and (2) I've done tens of thousands of sudoku puzzles.

Anyway, if you like sudoku, you will probably also like kakuro. Enjoy! Share your tips and success stories here!

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  • 1 year later...

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