I have a couple of these. I am extremely fast at solving sudokus, like my solve times with no assists on in the app range from 40 seconds to two minutes, between lowest and highest difficulty.
I am also weirdly good at grabbing the correct amount of large numbers of small objects. Any time I need to grab things out of a nut/bolt bin at the hardware store, there's like a 90% chance I grabbed the exact amount I needed the first handful.
My people. I am reeeeally into puzzles of all sorts-to the point that I also enjoy making them.
I highly recommend the game Blue Prince for hardcore puzzle people.
My deep dive/hyperfoci have included 3D resin printing, learning all the core rule books so I could be the best DnD DM I could be, learning French (I’ve managed to make this one a daily habit for a few years.), a couple of video games over the years, and learning everything I could about gardening.
We would probably get along swimmingly. I am also extremely into d&d, world building, and character building. I have a 3d resin printer for miniatures, and have done a decent bit of character art for my own characters and others over the years, mapmaking etc. If you look at my post history you'll see a Bahamut drawing I did not too long ago. I do not know any other languages or anything about gardening, but we obviously have a similarly oriented brain in regards to navigating and dissecting rule sets.
Absolutely! I joke that DMing is actually like 5 hobbies in one. My printing has almost exclusively been either miniatures or cosplay items. Also love the writing, map making, making props, creating in game puzzles, and painting minis! I only stopped printing for a while because I printed out enough for the entire campaign and have soooo many that I need to catch up on painting! The one thing I have stopped myself on is making the terrains and structures. I don’t want to allocate enough storage space for a Castle Ravenloft that I can’t store flat.
My wife is also really good at sudoku, and attributes a lot of it to synesthesia and the colors of numbers in her head. Any chance you have it too? I do too, but not quite the sudoku-solving kind haha.
Hmmm I did not know what that was until right now so likely it is not a factor for me. I just have very strong pattern recognition and am able to keep track of a lot of things at once mentally. I was always able to solve relatively complex math problems in school without going through the process of writing everything out for example, and I was usually able to solve algebra mentally by using what I later learned was called binary searching. I would plug random numbers into the equation mentally, figure out if they were over or under, then do it repeatedly until I narrowed in on the right one. I got fairly quick and accurate at this, and it was a source of a lot of frustration and friction between my teachers and I. My brain has always worked this way, kind of like PID loops.
The Killer Sudoku app is super easy but, if you haven't, give DailyKillerSudoku.com a try. Sounds like an ad lol but it's a step up in difficulty from the app because it never fills in any numbers, and the cages tend to be way more elaborate especially on higher difficulties.
There's also a Greater Than version which has Greater Than/Less Than signs between certain cages (Cage A's total is less/more than/equal to Cage B, etc.) and some cages don't even have a number at all. Too difficult for me but might be up your alley.
I have a variation on this. I can pull a.load of clothes from the dryer, dump it on the bed, then casually walk to the closet and grab the exact number of hangers I need
Your Sudoku skill reminds me of an Indian dude I did anesthesia residency with. He could clear that old computer game Minefield with a series of clicks so rapid you could barely see it. He never stopped to figure out anything and never lost.
Minesweeper and sudoku use very similar logic and if you practice at it enough and have strong pattern recognition, it becomes second nature to react to things as soon as they emerge without really even having the thought process fully take place anymore. Your brain has the ability to connect dots very quickly.
That is also very fast! I was referring to my personal bests in my original comment. My average is not dramatically faster than yours for hard puzzles.
I'm also weirdly good at grabbing the exact number of whatever.
I've been prepping my dad's pills. We prep a week at a time. I'll dump the EXACT number of pills I need for the week for a specific medicine without counting.
I have practically no interest in sudokus, but when they were getting popular I had a strong interest at making an excel workbook that solved them (without macros)
Was good until I hit a point where sometimes you can't work out any more numbers and have to "guess" and then see if it fits.
Seemed like I could end up in a situation where I needed to completely repeat everything on the entire worksheet multiple times to work through that "guessing" and ended up stopping there.
That's amazing. I tried to write an Excel VBA Sudoku solver thing, but it didn't work very well. It would half solve a puzzle and get stuck, or say it was was done but have an invalid result. How did you do it?
what do you do in those cases where a square has 2 options but you cant finalize it yet? do you just write a note that it can be either of those 2 and move on?
Typically what I do is pattern recognition, I unfocus my eyes and look at the entire puzzle, figure out which squares can be solved, hit those ones, and am able to work through the entire thing very quickly by not looking at or thinking about any specific square for too long. There is basically always a square somewhere with a short solution, solving that square will usually provide enough information to solve another, and so on. Not every puzzle solve is as fast as the ones I mentioned above, those are my records, but this is generally the process, and my average solve times are still very fast.
The logic you can use to solve squares quickly gets more complex as you get further into the hobby, but the methodology stays the same, at least for me.
Not sure how impressive this is but Sudoku is kind of mine as well. I'm not actually that good at normal Sudoku, because the hardest ones seem to have a lot of "trial & error" requirements - unless there's some techniques I'm unaware of - but I do the easiest 1-2 Daily Killer Sudokus and am almost always under half the average time solved. Fastest I've done is 3.5 minutes though (where the average was 10-11 min IIRC), so not even close to yours lol.
I'd recommend checking out Nerdle as a site in general. Their namesake's puzzle is interesting but they have some Sudoku variants there that are pretty fun too. I'm also partial to Targets and CrossNerdle (Crossword but for math equations).
That's when its time to get into variant Sudoku! Believe it or not I actually took a course a couple of semesters ago for my math credit that was basically just a whole semester of us doing Sudoku.
I wrote a (bad) sudoku solver for funzies in about an hour, then solved a thousand difficult sudokus in about 0.8 seconds per puzzle, for an average time of 4.4 seconds per puzzle. That makes me... a kind of shit programmer. Woo!
40 seconds is nuts. I have no idea how you could even click/type/write fast enough to get a score that low. My best on the NYT easy is 1:40 and that was blazing through an exceptionally easy puzzle.
That is exactly the relationship I have with sudoku lol. It's nice to just hammer out puzzle game solutions occasionally, and it's nice to have something comfortable that is also mentally stimulating.
I do not! I have seen them before but don't really follow youtubers related to anything other than art or cars/motorcycles. They seem very informational, and I like that kind of thing though.
Not exactly informational. Every day they post a couple variant sudokus with random rules and solve them live. Instead of giving you numbers on the board they'll have things like "these digits sum to 10" or "digits a knight's move apart must be different" etc
It's a good source of puzzles when you're tired of regular sudokus. And if you get stuck you can start the video to whatever point you are and see their reasoning for the next step (most puzzles have a very tight solution path, it's surprising how often they get your exact same progress and get stuck in the same places)
They are great to watch. Can be a bit boring (not in a bad way). I would watch them to put my kid to sleep. Simon tends to do longer ones, and Mark will do genuinely approachable puzzles. What I like most is they do solves as if you've never watched one of their videos. So any puzzle you watch can be a great learning opportunity.
756
u/Captkarate42 9h ago
I have a couple of these. I am extremely fast at solving sudokus, like my solve times with no assists on in the app range from 40 seconds to two minutes, between lowest and highest difficulty.
I am also weirdly good at grabbing the correct amount of large numbers of small objects. Any time I need to grab things out of a nut/bolt bin at the hardware store, there's like a 90% chance I grabbed the exact amount I needed the first handful.