About Sudoku Madness
What is Sudoku Madness?
Sudoku Madness isn't the brain-child of a brilliant puzzler that spends his nights scribbling numbers into boxes for the world to solve. This site is the creation of a Sudoku player, just like you.
I hadn't heard of Sudoku until Thanksgiving, 2005. While visiting with a variety of relatives over the holiday, I began to notice a pattern: it had eighty-one boxes, and a couple of digits written within them. Everywhere I went, someone was playing Sudoku. It wasn't until my sister challenged me to a race with the puzzle in the newspaper that I had any interest in playing such a silly game. You might think this story ends with me, the creator of Sudoku Madness, realizing he's a natural puzzler, but you'd be wrong. I lost, and Sudoku Madness is the result. You see, I'm a computer programmer by trade; people pay me to solve problems. So after losing miserably to my sister at my first game of Sudoku, I had a problem that needed to be resolved. I vowed that by the next time I saw her I would write a program to solve Sudoku.
That's exactly what I did, but it didn't stop there. I decided that it would be more fun and more challenging to write a program to create Sudoku than it would be to play them. A few days later I had a database with literally hundreds of thousands of puzzles, with no delivery vehicle to make them worth having. This is how Sudoku Madness was born.
What you will find at Sudoku Madness
Sudoku Madness has thousands of puzzles. Admittedly, there are dozens of other Sudoku sites that make that same offer, but here's the catch: when you visit other Sudoku sites your puzzles are generated randomly "on the fly." This allows almost infinite puzzle possibilities, but no repeatability. When you're stumped, you can't tell a friend which puzzle you're playing because the puzzle is random. At Sudoku Madness, all of our puzzles are stored, numbered, and rated by users like you. That means that you can send puzzles to your friends. It also means that you can print them out, then plug the Sudoku puzzle number back into Sudoku Madness later and check your solution.
That's right, Sudoku Madness also checks your puzzles. The Validator will verify that your solution has no empty squares and no repeats. It'll even highlight the exact location of an error in your solution.
I'm not a Sudoku-solving expert, but I've played enough Sudoku to know that its a game that does not transfer well to a computer screen. You need paper. You need a pencil. That's why all of Sudoku Madness' puzzles, in fact every page of the site, has been crafted to be "printer friendly." Print a puzzle by clicking the Print button provided, or use your browser's built-in print option. Either one works fine. Sudoku Madness will automatically print in an ink-friendly format: text is readable, games are playable, and we don't waste your ink by printing ads and other extraneous content. That stuff is expensive!
Speaking of paper, Sudoku Madness has free, print-ready Sudoku Scratch Paper. It comes in two formats: standard and minigrid. Both are very useful when solving Sudoku puzzles. I find the minigrid flavor of scratch paper useful, because I can scratch out possibilities as I go. Give them a try!
I can't forget the importance that the newspaper has played in the popularity of Sudoku. Like crossword puzzles before them, Sudoku has been published daily in thousands of newspapers accross the world, and sudokuers look forward to playing them each and every morning. Luckily, syndication lends itself well to the Internet. Every day a puzzle is selected to as the Daily Puzzle at Sudoku Madness. We also provide a syndicated feed in RSS format, so you can "tune-in" your browser automatically each morning to give you the newest puzzle.
What's to Come?
Admittedly, the current puzzle rating system leaves something to be desired. Currently our difficulty ratings are based on a ratio of number of times played to number of times solved. This rating system is obviously prone to error, so I've been working on an algorithm to rate a puzzle's difficulty based on the path to get to the answer, and what solution methods must be employed to get there. This will soon be put into effect, and you can expect a more accurate difficulty rating system when it arrives.
Of course, difficulty does not always equal fun; and a computer's idea of easy and difficulty aren't always the same as a human being's. That's why there will soon be user rating system in effect at Sudoku Madness as well.