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Reviews & QuestionsSudoku Studio lets you solve an entire board, or just the next cell. It provides many types of hints, including automated error checking, and showing all allowable values. It teaches you how to better solve sudokus by providing the exact reasoning to solve each step.
Sudoku Toolbox runs on Windows XP and needs the .Net Redistributable (the MSI Installer will automatically install this). You can always check our free trial first to make sure that this program runs on your machine.
Sudoku Toolbox main features:
About Sudoku Difficulty (Click "screenshots" to view Sudoku Difficulty chart)
A Sudoku is solved by filling in initial open squares, and once all squares are filled in, the puzzle is solved. One may think that more initial open squares means more work to solve the puzzle and then make the conclusion that a harder puzzle just has more initial open squares. However, such a conclusion is flawed. Harder Sudokus don't necessarily mean fewer initial squares.
We'll avoid a deep mathematical discussion here and just jump to the chase. This chart compares difficulty (X axis) to the initial number of open squares (Y axis) across 3400 different puzzles. We've omitted puzzles easier than difficulty=20 from our sample set because they're so easy, they're uninteresting.
As you can see, having less than 56 initial open squares almost guarantees an easy Sudoku puzzle (difficulty < 40). In this range, fewer initial open squares make the puzzle simpler. Most medium and hard puzzles can have 56 or 57 initial open squares. In other words, the initial boards have the same number of open squares across a very wide difficulty range.
Our Sudoku generator takes great care to accurately label the difficulty of the puzzles it generates. We can do this by leveraging our rule-based deductive solving engine. It can solve the Sudoku and then estimate difficulty by the complexity of the rules needed to solve it.
