My mom has a new addiction: sud0ku . Have you guys played this game? You have to fill in the rows, columns and blocks with the numbers 1-9. It's getting really popular. Apparently the NPR puzzle-master Will Shortz (and one of my biggest crushes) thinks it will be as big as crossword puzzles were for a while or the Rubik's cube was in the 80s.
So my mom is very generous. To a fault. Now the mister and I share this addiction. The two of us spent a long while Saturday working on a very difficult sud0ku. It didn't help that we were both trying to get over hangovers. We finally solved it and were quite pleased with ourselves. We thought we had this logic thing down.
Until Sunday. And the Sud0ku M0nster.
We waited for my mom to arrive and thought it would be fun to work the puzzle together. We were wrong. Very very wrong.
The three of us spent hours and hours on this stupid thing. We all got butt sores from our inability to leave the couch. We went without food and water. The dogs went unfed. Luckily my dad had a football game to watch. The three of us got completely frustrated.
Then the mister said "I could just write a program to solve this. That would be a lot quicker."
I said that would be totally cheating and even more would show him for the geek that he is. He's in a bit of a tight place: won't work on the puzzle any more but definitely won't let the monster win.
By the time I'd gotten up this morning he'd been coding for a couple of hours. He's got both the classic and the monster accounted for and didn't like how any of the other programs handled hints so it's working out a better way. Gotta put that artificial intelligence specialty of his to good use. He was late to work (where he actually gets paid for such coding) because the hints weren't doing as well as they should be at this point.
I gave him hell because he doesn't have the pretty formatting down yet. Of course that's what I care most about. And teased him about all the time he'd wasted today. But he did make me chortle with glee because he was so cute programming in his pj's today.
As soon as he left I did the puzzles from the paper. Yesterday's and today's. I made myself do a bit of real work before getting lost in the computer forever doing sud0ku. I instant messaged him to tell him he what a bad influence he was. His response: i am a good influence, btw. i made you laugh before 10am, so i figure today is already successful."
He's not quite as happy about providing so much grist for the blog. I figure I'm just getting started. He gives me tons of material.
*raises hand*
My name is OvaGirl and I am a Sudoku addict...
Clicked on that sudoku monster and it scared the bejesus out of me! That's very very dangerous stuff. Back away!
Posted by: OvaGirl | Wednesday, 21 September 2005 at 01:29
oh yes another sudoku addict here. Not fast, but i usually get there in the end!
Posted by: thalia | Friday, 23 September 2005 at 10:59