Done, an easy one.

done, not bad...

i got stuck. guessed once - checkpoints are cool...

that was much easier than yesterday's hard puzzle. I'd have ranked that as medium at most.

I love your icon, h :D

thx. ive liked your smile too sprite. :D

going pro makes your eyes all watery from staring at puzzles too long... gl on todays - im playing with archives now.

and hf with the archives!

tyvm

(sprite) doh - all this time id been seeing a blue-ball-face with white eyes and a huge smile. i just clicked on your icon and realized it was a devilish heart. funny. anyways - enjoy... sorry to interrupt. :)

lol, np, and thanks

i can't see the end of this one! LOL

hi sprite! I lost my account name! can't find it!!

ow, that s*cks

there IS no end - just more numbers... j/k

I hope mrp can still apply in here

isn't there a help function for forgettin gyour account name?

yeah probably... just too tired to look for it and wait for dr.g to get back to me I think... I just lost all my workings cause I accidentally pressed the back button ... :(

argh... well, you're entitled to tiredness ;)

not having a good day... sometimes it makes you just want to crawl back into bed and try again tomorrow. :)

yeah... or skip a decade ;)

nope - skip too maky decades and all youre left with is wheelchairs and gumming your food. just a day-or-two for me, thanx... ;)

lol... ok, sounds reasonable.

yesterday's was easier for me than this one

honestly, i used a single guess on both yesterdays and todays. i think going-pro made me dummer (or less patient to look thru things).

lol - dumBer...

*big grin* being pro makes it easier to use trial and error, for sure. But my fun is in solving, really knowing why I put a number somewhere. Finally found what I was overlooking on this one, here it comes :)

done! Bye all, till next time

congrats! cya

start

go!

done

used 2 greens in the mid.

go

stuck....hate to go green

Go.

I like the way this one begins, before greens are needed.

Difficulty score 27. There are 3 pairs in one block. Find them and the rest is easy.

Then I'll see if I can do it without greens.

easy without greens.

Good going. I'm stuck w/o greens.

lots of sets.

mostly pairs, but there's some triples in there.

Any loners?

nope, but you'll get a conjugate chain that breaks several other things down once it's solved for.

I get to a certain stage and my brain starts getting fuzzed over with regret that I ever started.

The funny thing about pair and triples, etc. is that there is alway a complimentary tuple.

If you have a row with 5 empty cells, and you find a naked triple, there must have been a hidden pair also.

I was just thinking about that. Is the complimentary tuple just as easy to spot as the one you found?

In fact, after you discover the naked triple, you then uncover the hidden pair.

Maybe that's why I so seldom find the hidden ones.

Generally speaking, I have found naked quads easier to spot than hidden pairs!

But Doc, it's possible for a row to have three pairs. Something there must not be a compliment.

Quads are lovely.

Also the wxyz-wing, though I've yet to spot one in the wild, it's basically a distributed quad.

Sure, 2 pair make a quad, then the pairs within the quad are complimentary.

Okay.

Yesterday's puzzle is killing me.

In yesterday's, there's a quad that opens up a pair. Then it's busted.

Yesterdays puzzle got the highest score (50) of any of the Hards published here.

hmm, I'll have to green it then

I think so.

I'd recommend it too.

My brain is getting fuzzed over. I need a break before continuing without greens.

Found it.

hmm, an xy-wing reveals another pair as well.

I almost forgot, the best part about complimentary tuples is that one of the tuples is always naked.

Or more accurately, at least one of the tuples is always naked. Both could be naked, only 1 could be hidden.

mmmmm, naked tuples

This site is in danger of losing its G rating.

hi everyone

boom!

Well, I regret that I need to get to work. Going green.

Even with greens, I'm not seeing those tuples.

Ah, there's one.

Done. Ashamed I needed greens. Nothing harder than pairs I had missed.

hi im new to this game what are greens?

not that i'm an expert, i'm not, greens are helps. kinda like allows you put down possibilities. go into Help. more info there.

yeah ive read about it i understand now thanks

as for naked tuples... I don't want to get into it LOL

Phew! Just finished yesterday's. It was a toughie. I think I need a break before I start today's.

go

done

minimal greens - much easier than yesterdays, --- much, much easier :)

HK - was that the absolute minimum green? ;-)

Or a relative minima?

Done! Much easier than yesterday's but had to use greenies.

go

done. autofill g+r. the triple broke it open.

Woohoo, I broke into experts on rankings after going crazy playing yesterday :D

I haven't been working the archives much lately, so I'm stuck in Pro for the time being.

I've been kinda ridiculous with archive lately

Well, I have them nearly completed, only about two months' worth of puzzles left, I just haven't found time to do anything more than the newest daily ones, and I'm even falling behind on those.

That's what happens when final exams are looming, I suppose.

Oh how I don't miss tests :D Although, on the other hand, corporate deadlines aren't fun either, and I'll have one of those looming soon

Ah yes, the working world. I hope to avoid going there for as long as possible.

I'll take college any day :)

While I prefer the environment, the money I make in the corporate world versus the money I spend to stay in college helps make up for it :D I do miss academia though. Someday I'd like to teach, and combine being there with making money and the immense satisfaction of teaching.

Well, someone else is paying for my schoolin', at least presently. I'm hoping to get a scholarship and go to some fancy-pants institution with my high gpa, though.

That's cool. My wife's currently working on her masters and we got a random scholarship to cover everything but books for the next full year (including this summer, oddly). I was a slacker in my early years of college, so I kinda flushed all hopes of free money. :/

I haven't actually applied for any free money yet, but I've only just completed my freshman year, so there's still time I suppose.

All this talk of numbers reminded me that I hadn't updated my IronSudoku averaging spreadsheet in awhile. I like stats, so it's interesting to see what score averages are over time

I can tell you the average of all prior puzzles given a certain day. It's much more chaotic at the beginning, spiking to an average difficulty of 2.5 once, but it's slowly trending down over time.

Back in January, the average puzzle score dropped below 2 and hasn't come back up since, although it's still really close to 2

Whoops, was off reading another web page for a bit. Sorry.

Ignoring that the first puzzle was an easy, the average puzzle difficulty didn't dip below 2 until puzzle 232 pulled it under

yay math

and now I have to get away from this machine for awhile, boo.

hello

does anyone play babble

Anne2 r u there

ello every body

go

done. simple comapred to the last two days.

the puzzle is glitched

no way to win

nvm