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by 53x15 2486 days ago
This sounds like Crook's Algorithm (https://www.ams.org/notices/200904/tx090400460p.pdf), which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, especially for pencil-and-paper puzzle solving since pigeonhole inferences are easy for people to spot. But this inference rule does not suffice on its own for many hard puzzles. Crook's algorithm still requires backtracking.