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kaajjo / LibreSudoku

LibreSudoku - Sudoku app for android built with Kotlin + Jetpack Compose + Material3
GNU General Public License v3.0
415 stars 31 forks source link

Difficulty discrepancy #31

Open nvllz opened 1 year ago

nvllz commented 1 year ago

I played some puzzles and found Easy mode to be sometimes more difficult than Moderate. It's really weird I can't finish some 'easy' sudokus and spend like 20 minutes to get like 40% progress, and when I try to play a game on moderate level, it takes me the same time to solve it. I think it's something wrong, because in other apps some easy modes take me 6-10 mins to solve the grid, while here I can't even finish some of them, because there are several possibilities in each cell, so either i'm too bad, or idk.. But I guess easy mode should be the one I should be able to finish without any special techniques. To make the app beginner friendly it would be nice to have easy mode to be really easy. I counted number of given integers in the Libre Sudoku easy mode.

Not to mention the 12x12 Easy Sudoku, which I have never been able to solve. I spent 88 minutes on it and gave up... now I've just found a solution online. A solver had to use the trial and error method to proceed. Again, this is the easy mode.

image And it still took over 80 steps to complete, even with the numbers I figured out.

I think we get way too few initial integers. Compared to the easy mode of sudoku.com it's even 15 less. You get numerous possibilities and it is totally discouraging to play the game if you wanted to relax with an easy 10-15 minute puzzle. Or maybe add another, easier difficulty level? Please, think about it

kaajjo commented 1 year ago

The app grades the difficulty of a sudoku based on the techniques required to solve it And yes, currently it's broken when generating a new sudoku, shame on me, I didn't notice it before. I already found a problem. Soon will release a patch (with other fixes as well) and then see if it solved your problem I'll think about an easier difficulty level, but the easier a sudoku is, the more time it takes to generate it, so can't promise Thank you for reporting

p.s your 12x12 sudoku difficulty is actually "challenge", that why the solver had to use the trial and error method

kaajjo commented 1 year ago

Checkout new version https://github.com/kaajjo/Libre-Sudoku/releases/tag/v1.4.1

nvllz commented 1 year ago

Okay, the easy mode for 9x9 is much easier now and it takes me ~10 minutes to solve, which is fine. Now I can relax when I have less time. But the 12x12 mode on easy difficulty still feels a bit challenging.

ELT4N1N commented 1 year ago

I can also confirm easy 9x9 mode is now solvable and it also takes me about 8-10 minutes. It is still more challenging than on other Sudoku Apps that I tried. On these, easy was solvable in about 3,5 minutes and this difficulty was there more like medium. But I like this level of difficulty. I haven't tried the other modes, so no opinion on them.

keverets commented 5 months ago

Just wanted to note that with my methods of solving, the Easy mode has a higher average and best time for me than Moderate (all in 9x9)

It does seem that Easy difficulty should be reduced to allow new players to have a chance to ramp up.