So most resources providing Sudoku puzzles assign a difficulty category to each

Question

So most resources providing Sudoku puzzles assign a difficulty category to each puzzle, even some I've seen with 15 or more difficulty categories. But what is a good way to assign these difficulty categories? If enough human puzzle solvers were used, the average time for a human to complete a puzzle and the percentage of people who successfully solved the puzzle could be computed for the human sample, and difficulty categories assigned accordingly. But it seems like there should be predictable scenarios that keep appearing as various puzzles are being solved that affect the average human difficulty, which could be automatically detected as a computer solves the puzzle and then these patterns could be assembled into a predicted average difficulty for humans. Are there / what are good techniques to do this? Maybe machine learning with enough training data of human performance on sample puzzles?

Explanation / Answer

There are have been many such attempts. Most of them try to derive deduction rules which humans seem to use to solve Sudoku puzzles.

My money is on this approach:

M

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse S
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.