The Omnifarium - Sudoku/48.html

Notice

I am no longer posting new puzzles to this blog. For all of my Sudoku puzzles, old and new, please visit Sudoku in another section of this website. I will still create and offer new puzzles, in batches of a couple of hundred, once a week or so.

Sudoku #48

Category: Sudoku
Thu, 11 Aug 2005, 08:49

This year, I turned 48. You know what, being 48 sucks. Yesterday, I went to St. Michael's Hospital for lithotripsy. If you know what that is, then you know what I had. For the past three weeks, though, while waiting for the procedure, I feel like I've been constantly passing stones. Needless to say, I've been stuck at home feeling pretty crummy.

But one thing that has helped me relax over the past few weeks is Sudoku. Not solving puzzles, but rather playing with my Sudoku program. When I first met Sudoku on the pages of the Toronto Star, it was obvious to me that the puzzle was quite amenable to analysis by computer program. And so I wrote a program. First, I used the programming language Python, which is great for rapid development and prototyping. Later, I rewrote the program in C for better performance.

What also helped keep me sane over the past few weeks was creating and selecting puzzles, writing commentary, and posting them on this blog. Even if no one out there reads my blog or tries to solve my puzzles, this has been very beneficial and therapeutic for me.

Anyways, now that the stone has been successfully obliterated by the great people at St. Mike's, hopefully I'll be back on my feet soon, and I'll get back to more important endeavors, like getting back to work, or finishing the basement renovation job I started months ago. Will that mean fewer Sudoku blog postings? At the moment, I have puzzles ready to go for the next month and a half. All that's needed for most is some commentary. But there's always something to comment on.

Hans

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