I decided to do some reasearch…

My first thought was to look in the phone book. How many Guthries are there? How many Gormans are there? Then using statistics on the first name and a bit of extrapalation I could work it out – I’m a mathematician ( not a good one but one none the less) so it didn’t seem that hard.

In the phone book it turns out there are three Guthries and two Gormans. This didn’t look good. It wasn’t enough to find out if there were more or less: I wouldn’t to be more unique. I also knew that my family wasn’t registered in the phone book – and there are five of us. So so far I had at least eight Guthries to two Gormans – not looking good. Now as it happens one of those Gormans happens to be Dave Gorman’s mother – incredible (he went to the same school albeit a couple of years earlier).

Now if the trend was to continue (that is eight Guthries to two Gromans) across the country then I would be stuffed; there would be more of me and less of him: I would be less unique.

However, a thought struck me: when I went to see Dave Gorman at the Surgery in his (and my) home town of Stafford he had said about a website called http://www.yournotme.com. I decided to check it out.

I typed in my name and waited for the results: 86. Brilliant there are 86 people out there in the UK with my name. Is that good? I didn’t know. I typed in Dave Gorman and… 0. There are no people called Dave Gorman. I thought ‘ but I know one’. Then I realised I knew noone called DAVE Groman, but I did know one called DAVID. I typed it in, pressed enter and bang: 146. Yes. I’m more unique!

So in answer to your question Sarah there are more Dave Gormans than William Guthries in the UK. Worldwide? I can only guess, but I hope so

My brother’s name is James Guthrie by-the-bye. So close but so far Jamie!

Sorry for the rather off topic posting, but I am amazed at the coincidence of this :)

The main difficulty in completing the new ’super’ Su Doku is in keeping all that new information in your head if, as I do, you solve them without writing any notes.

http://www.puzzler.co.uk/D/D1X00000.asp?id=TSU&user=null

(taken out of a frameset, since I couldn’t link to it otherwise.) The puzzler.co.uk website has a couple of sample puzzles you can play online as well.

I think that they used to refer to these puzzles as “Tsunami”; if that’s the case, they may have renamed them after recent events in Asia.

http://www.cherryroms.com/ (requires free registration)

p.s. I was here for the electoral map; excellent work on that.

Um… any Indie-readers with scanners out there?

First, it seems to me that almost all puzzles rely on following some sort of recipe. Cryptic crosswords have more complex recipes than does Su Doku, but you can still teach people the recipe. An extension of this thought is that chess or go are iterated puzzles (every time it is your turn you have to solve a puzzle). The puzzle is so large and complex that humans can do very well by pattern matching and intuition guided by experience. In principle, however, both puzzles could be completely solved by a computer that was large and powerful enough.

Second, solving Su Doku isn’t the only challenge available to computer programmers. Like you, I recently came across these puzzles, but rather than thinking about how to write a program to solve the puzzle, I thought it might be interesting to write a program to generate them. One approach I have in mind is to randomly fill a grid with numbers according to the rules, then pick a number at random and if it is logically entailed by what is in the grid at the time, then remove it. Repeat until no more numbers can be removed.

Finally, I have to agree with you that puzzles that only humans can solve have a certain something. I love The Independent’s “Get the picture” for that reason. But the best example of this class of puzzle (often done for charity) are those where the clues are initial letters and lengths of the key words in a phrase (e.g. “The T—– D— of C——–”). What fascinates me about them is that there doesn’t seem to be any analytical process one can go through to solve them, but the answers are almost always universally accepted as right. And they can pop into my head at any time.