Done

Done

Difficulty score 39.

Done.

done

i think the number of things i can fill before doing green is the main thing in my sense of difficulty...

ugh this one is HORRID

that is, had to green very early. however, once greened, forcing chain worked wonders. which may mean that i missed other things i could do beforehand.

ahain having the worst time with an expert!!!!!!!!!!

AGAIN!

Did about half of it*, then I went green. Once I went green it was easy.

* Half is an estimate. I didn't count or anything.

Like hurshy, I had to go green fairly early. But just the process of adding greens (I don't use auto-green) helped me to discover some things that should have been obvious (but weren't to me). One thing led to another, and the puzzle solved relatively easily after that.

go

Still have to guess with greens so will START OVER AGAIN!!

re-start

DrWho. No, total time definitely influences our perception of difficulty. At the Easy level, a great abundance of moves everywhere you look makes it seem easy, and one choke point, even if it is easy, can hang you up for a while. At the Medium level, more choke points make it seem more difficult than fewer. At the Hard level (for which I absolutely refuse to guess and sometimes am defeated) the time, effort and ingenuity for finding the secret influences difficulty perception. At the Expert level, sometimes chains of varying lengths can be visualized, making them not too bad. Depending on how you feel about a guess -- that would effect your difficulty perception. The need for guess trees makes it worse than one that can be solved with a single guess.

I should add (I've mentioned this before) that when one move follows another, that makes it seem easier than when you reach a dead end and have to start searching everywhere. When one cell is filled, then you look at the same row, column, block and number for the next move. That is greatly easier than search nine rows, nine columns, nine blocks and nine numbers.

There's auto-green?How on earth do you do that?

go

Hmm. 3 restarts.

UTH: I see what you are saying. My only point then is the more choke points the longer it takes and the longer it takes the longer the average time to fill a cell. So in short, the time to complete a puzzle is directly correlated to your perception of difficulty. Or in other words, time to complete is a reasonably good metric for difficulty.

done, ng 2 guesses

digondda: a script for auto green can be found here:

http://www.brittlefish.com/

Thanks Dr Who

You're welcome!

2 more restarts. Bedtime. Will work on this later.

Boy, in today's, I've only got four and stuck. Am I missing something?

Got one more.

Cooking again.

A really neat argument at the level of 22 filled.

Oh, neat! An "almost" block pincer goes to a difficult loner.

Done

Did it! No green. No guess! Neat stuff. There were two separate chains that eliminated two different numbers from one cell, making that cell a loner.