Zorac's LiveJournal

Notes to self:

1. Do not use the washing machine and the tumble dryer at the same time.
2. Spare fuses are good things to have.
3. When a plug is scorchingly hot to the touch and both it and the 4-way it was plugged into have melted patches, that's bad.

Laundry is such fun.

So much for the weather. The distressingly nice Friday was, of course, followed by a wet and gloomy weekend. The rain forcing everyone indoors means that everywhere's full for lunch and the packed shops have ridiculous queues for the changing rooms. To add to the joy, both Slither and Silent Hill had moved to evening showings only, leaving me with my third choice, M:I:3. It's actually a pretty reasonable action flick, marred mostly by the annoying Tom "shark sofa" Cruise trying to insinuate himself into virtually every frame. Oh, and the new Superman trailer is rather promising.

Now that The Da Vinci Code Quest on Google is drawing to a close, the puzzles are really starting to get tricky - the first three tiers were fairly straightforward, but the fourth, not so much. Yesterday's sudoku-style puzzle was really quite nasty, and today's "Restoration" one was taking so long by trial-and-error, that I ended up writing a program to solve it (what, me, a geek?).

Ages ago, I started coding up a perl-based sudoku solver and managed to get it solving lots of puzzles with only a very basic set of rules for solving them. Recently, alnitak (who is also writing a solver, this time in java) showed me a really nasty puzzle which neither of our solvers could completed (although a human could spot the next step). After some discussions we came up with a new solving rule, which I've implemented in my code and now allows me to solve the puzzle.

Anyway, what I'm looking for is some truly evil sudokus to test my solver with, so if you've got any nasty ones that you can send me, that would be much appreciated.

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