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Comment by alhirzel | Hacker News Reader

Then you will hate this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4

I love it though, his reactions are priceless.

It was this exact person that made me hate it. Oh look an empty puzzle, except you can’t have consecutive numbers, the 2s can’t be in the corners and every alternate cell is the sum of the previous two. It’s stupid.

Genuinely curious - what makes it stupid?

The rules become flexible and abnormal for the sole purpose of supporting someone's agenda. Maybe enjoyable or appreciable in a meta sense, but from a game mechanic PoV it makes strategies meaningless.

Part of the point of variant sudoku is discovering / inventing brand new interactions you've never seen before. And crowd-sourcing votes on whether that discovery process is fun. You are basically getting introduced to a new set of axioms and have to discover and prove theorems.

What agenda is that?

Agenda to increase views I assume

Not the OP, but I think they mean that the change to the rules is done to reduce the search tree a program should traverse but makes it difficult for a human to reason about. We search for solutions heuristically and because of the added rules must back track a lot more, which makes it tiring.

So, the change makes it easier for a computer but not for a human.

The thumbnail implies there is a way to solve a seemingly impossible puzzle. But it’s really not solvable using traditional rules, you have to come up with weird one off rules to solve it. At that point is it really sudoku or just a sudoku shaped different game. It’s like playing checkers with chess pieces.

What did you expect? It's obviously unsolvable under standard rules--it's proven that a classic Sudoku requires a minimum of 17 given digits, and even if you didn't know that, it's fairly obvious with a little thought that 8 or 9 or so would be a lower bound. What makes this particular puzzle surprising is that any relatively short rule set would make this grid uniquely solvable.

Note "relatively short". This channel gets lots of "miracle" puzzle submissions that they reject for the very reasons you claim: arbitrary, lengthy rules for the sake of making an empty grid. (Occasionally they let through some in-jokey rules about 3s in the corner or something like that, which to be honest irks me a bit as well.)

I expect it not to be called sudoku at that point. Call it what it really is- a nonomino or kakuro or whatever.

They only call it a sudoku when it is a sudoku. I.e sudoku rules apply. There are additional constraints, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a sudoku. Los Alamos chess or crazyhouse chess is still chess, isn't it? Chess is really a family of games, and the same is true of sudoku.

No, los alamos chess is los alamos chess. No one refers to it as just chess. The furthest someone might go would be chess with or without castling. There’s pai gow poker and Texas holdem poker and they’re referred to as such because they’re games with different rules. I don’t particularly care to die on this sudoku hill but it bothers me enough to say something.

People very, very frequently refer to holdem as just poker. I've also heard five cars draw referred to as just poker. If you asked someone playing PLO what they're playing, a lot of people just say 'poker' and then elaborate if it becomes necessary.

That’s because it’s by far the most popular form. No one is going to call pai gow just poker.

Why is it okay to call the game a nonomino or kakuro, when it's entirely unlike either game, but so obscene to call it a sudoku, the rules of which it includes?

And it's not called a sudoku, by the way. It's called a sudoku variant. And yes, with classic sudoku requiring 17 clues, you just have to add additional hints to make anything with 16 clues or less solvable. And a lot of variant puzzles are still a lot harder than anything you'd find in a newspaper.

There are lots of interesting patterns and strategies emerging from variants that scratch just the same logical itch as sudoku does. And sometimes ideas from variants get picked up by setters for classic sudokus, like the Phistomefel ring, which was popularized by a setter who mainly sets sudoku variant puzzles.

The linked video is very much a nonomino.

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