How do Sudoku creators (the human kind) know that they’ve given enough clues to make a puzzle solvable while still making sure there are no errors?
In: 39
For a standard sudoku, at least 17 digits must be given for the puzzle to have a unique solution. Computers can solve sudokus pretty quickly, and so you can test to make sure it’s solvable and that no errors are involved. Then you can test it out to make sure that a human can solve it at the difficulty level you’d like. All of the testing can be done by hand, but a computer can easily prove that there are no mistakes or duplicate solutions in a fraction of the time.
For variant sudokus (which are becoming more and more popular), computers can still solve them really efficiently, but human testing is still really important to make sure that the tricks and logic involved are appropriate in difficulty unless you’re trying to create something really, really hard. There’s a YouTube channel called Cracking the Cryptic that provides new puzzles every day, and they’ve had several creators on sharing their own methods for creating and testing their puzzles, which I found really interesting.
Also, just a big shoutout in general to [Cracking the Cryptic](https://www.youtube.com/c/CrackingTheCryptic), those guys helped get me and my wife through the pandemic with our sanity.
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