First responses

Having now been seen by a few people in the know, SLIDOKU is receiving good reviews, and there has been only one minor criticism which we shall aim to address in the first upgrade. When trying to solve the most difficult level, the human memory is in some cases being taxed in terms of memorising the positions before even beginning sliding the pieces into place. The proposal is to include a facility for adding text to the blank squares so as to be able to record or try various positions for the digits needed. Whether this is welcomed generally remains to be seen, but we'll check out this as an option and after Christmas set about adding this.

Any comments?

SLIDOKU Goes on sale

As promised, SLIDOKU finally went on sale today, in fact just moments ago, but on time and two hours within our deadline. We're all chuffed, and we hope you'll be too...
Plenty of time to buy for Christmas. Just go to SlideMe using the link on the right.

Happy Sliding

Ready 4 Launch

The day has finally arrived to launch our first real app. SLIDOKU is about to become live on several Android marketplaces, either tonight or sometime tomorrow. Our preview video is now on You Tube, see link on the right hand column, and from this the concept, methods of play and potential for long life are clearly shown. Most players will be content to solve basic puzzles and hone their skills of logic and memory. Those who master the 3x3 puzzle will want to add the complexity of resolving a sudoku clue grid first, and then completing the sliding puzzle. A few hardy soles will move on to the pro level and want to conquer the ultimate challenge, a sudoku grid with minimal clues that needs to be resolved before the final element of the sliding puzzle grid can be commenced.

All we can say is, GOOD LUCK!

Educational benefits

As we near the launch of SLIDOKU, it appears that the educational and mental benefits are as yet not fully recognised but our team of volunteer testers, (nearly all are programmers or in the education field), are finding that the combined elements of the logic used to solve a 3x3 sliding puzzle and a different form of logic used to solve sudoku, are both able to provide a tangible benefit to the mental agility of the player which is a huge boost to our credibility as designers of puzzles with genuine challenges.

It is recognised that playing sudoku regularly can be an aid to preventing the onset of Alzheimers, and we heartily support this discovery and hope that the addition of another logic element will make our app a popular one for all ages, but especially as an adult pastime.

As a result of these emerging discoveries, we are now hard at work developing other variants of the SLIDOKU concept that include symbols and other visually stimulating alternatives to standard alphabetic symbols. We'd welcome any input or ideas from professionals, academics and others that might assist in this quest.

Onwards and upwards

SLIDOKU

After what has been a quiet year for Clueless Games, we are cock-a-hoop to be able to announce what we've been doing.

In recent months we've been forming a team, on a global scale, with programmers in China and elsewhere who have been working on a collaborative project that we call SLIDOKU.

SLIDOKU as you've probably guessed already, is a relative of Sudoku. A distant relative, as Sudoku only provides the clue format. The fun aspect of the app is that it involves a set of nine 3x3 sliding puzzles that form a grid. Each nonet (group of nine clues) is a separate puzzle and all nine must be solved to complete the whole grid.

For many of us, a sliding puzzle is something we haven't seen for years, possibly since our youth.  We would find them in crackers, or buy them with our pocket money and have fun solving the number grid, in a simple 1-8 sequence, until they became too easy. Likewise Sudoku was a fantastic success, and still is, but there is a race to enhance or expand on the original puzzle concept in order to maintain the following that it has developed.

The ground breaking step that we have made is to take these two elements and make them part of one puzzle.

The player is first confronted with a simple grid to solve, by which we mean a grid in which all of the clues are provided, in the background.
At any time, the player can hit the REVEAL button and see all of the clues before returning to the sliding puzzle grids to manually move the play pieces into the correct pattern.

There is a feeling of achievement when the player completes a nonet, with this causing the ninth tile to magically appear and so prevent further accidental movement. This challenge is truly engaging and the desire to carry on and solve the remaining nonets is almost addictive.

Once the player finds this element of play coming naturally, the real challenge can begin. By selecting the tricky level, the player suddenly finds the number of clues reduced, as the clue grid reverts to a sudoku clue format. In this guise, the puzzle becomes much trickier as the player now needs all the skill of sudoku solving before they can move the sliding pieces into the correct place.

Of course, for some players even this challenge will eventually feel relatively straight forward, so for the really skilled we have added a third layer of difficulty. The Pro level has minimal clues and requires a very high level of memory as well as the logic skills required for solving the sliding piece element.

For the future, we have several derivative versions in development, and welcome approaches from any manufacturer or retailer wishing to pre-load the Slidoku app in new phones. At present we are launching on the Android platform, and in future we shall be launching the app for iphone/ipad and windows 7 formats. If you have a specific requirement for another platform, we are happy to consider this also.

One other option available, we can customise the app as a branding or marketing tool, changing the numeric grid for one containing either symbols or a product name. The only restriction, or rather preference, is that the name to be used has no repeating letters and comprises nine letters, or eight letters and a symbol or logo.

We welcome feedback, suggestions and requests.

Please note, SLIDOKU is a trademark of Clueless games, and the rules of Slidoku have been lodged with the UKCS and is copyright Clueless Games. A patent for the physical rendition of the puzzle was filed in 2007 and design rights have been applied for.

BDi - Clueless receive accolade from Berkeley maths Professor

The following is the full text of a letter of support received from Professor Jorge Nuno Silva of Lisbon and Berkeley Universities, and well known author and games expert.....

The word “Sudoku” is a short version of a Japanese expression that means something like “the numbers should be single”.

Ïn Sudoku the fact that we use numbers is irrelevant. We could as well play with colors or letters for the same purpose. This is a purely logic puzzle. Because it is so purely logic and uses numbers, some take it for a mathematical exercise, which is not true.

This puzzle was created by Howard Garnes, a retired architect when, at 74, published in the American journal Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games, under the title “Number Place”. Later, in 1986, it was published with huge success in Japan. In 1997, a retired judge from New Zealand, Wayne Gould, noticed one of these puzzles. He spent the following years developing a software program able to generate new Sudoku puzzles at the level of the ones produced by the Japanese, which were based on human creativity. Gould’s puzzles made it into western newspapers, showing up in The Times in 2004. From then the diffusion was fast and today many newspapers carry daily puzzles.

The Japanese company Mikoli, responsible for the introduction of the game in Japan, holds that its puzzles are better made than the ones depending on the computer. The process of generating a good puzzle is more an art than a technique. Gould argues that, for each level of difficulty, the puzzles produced by his software are more elegant and carry less clues at the starting position. The readers of Times seem to find him right.

Even though it is not an arithmetic puzzle, Sudoku has roots in some objects that dear to the mathematicians.

In the 18th century, the Swiss mathematician Euler studied the so called latin squares, which are square arrays of numbers, nxn, in which each row and each column carries the numbers 1, 2, …, n. Each Sudoku puzzle successfully filled is, of course, a latin square of order 9x9. But, as the Sudoku has a special restraint relative to the nine boxes, there are more latin squares 9x9 than Sudoku puzzles. To be exact, there are

5 524 751 496 156 892 842 531 225 600 latin squares 9x9 and 6 670 903 752 021 072 936 960 Sudoku puzzles. Two numbers hard to apprehend…

Euler was led to his research on latin squares when he was studying magic squares, which are square arrays of numbers in which the sums of the rows, columns and main diagonals are the same. Here is an example of a 3x3 magic square:

8	1	6
3	5	7
4	9	2

As can be easily checked all rows columns and the two diagonals add up to 15.

Sudoku shows then a very rich pedigree. As usually happens with good puzzles, there are some theoretical aspects of Sudoku that are still far from being well understood. It is hard to characterize the different difficulty levels of the puzzles, beyond considering the amount of clues given at the outset. How can we guarantee keeps the difficulty level along its resolution, avoiding sudden trivialization upon filling of a certain cell? When making up a new puzzle, how can we be sure its solution is unique?

Some of these questions are addressed by brute force computer calculations, but not all are within reach of actual machine performance. The Japanese have a point when they prefer human conception over computerized one.

Sudoku is, to say it in few words, an excellent logic puzzle. As it uses numbers, it is not restricted, as cross words are, to any particular cultures, which helps to explain its immense universal success.

However, it is, as we usually say, a game for one player. The usual variants vary the dimensions and form of the array. But, the ones proposed by BM Clent and D Shenton go much further, giving a new flavor to this puzzle. Clicstrips is a good example: the obligation of treating the numbers in groups of three and the absence of initial clues changes the nature of the mental activity, by introducing a new complexity.

However, we still have puzzles…

But the same authors created games for two players from the the puzzles. Clent and Shenton transformed a good puzzle in an excellent game for two people. Actually, in several such games.

Their variants make it possible to associate Sudoku with all the drama of a good boardgame, always respecting Sudoku’s original essence. As a matter of fact, the way they build the games bring attention to the most interesting features of the original puzzle. The new approach avoids the solitary way it was usually practiced, offering us excellent social recreation. It is only fair to emphasize that this recreation has high intellectual level. Shendoku and Ninja Squares are great examples!

As any good game, chess for example, Clent and Shenton’s games work in several levels of sophistication, always with interest, being appropriate for people of the age range 7-77, just like Tim Tim.

Jorge Nuno Silva

University of Lisbon.  

Welcome to Clueless Games

2009 sees not only the launch of the Clueless blog, but of a range of puzzles and games from our main partners BDi and Innuendo. The first of these to be released is likely to be Clicstix, or one of it's derivatives, Flipstix. These are games and puzzles with their origins in Sudoku, as far as layout and placement rules, but are a new generation of ideas taking the Sudoku concept and making a genuine two player game, and a range of new puzzles involving moveable pieces, some magnetic, that can be located in many different patterns from one set. 

More news will follow this month as the launch of this exciting range progresses.