[Barrin92]

guess and check for a human works when the problem space is small enough. You can't guess and check yourself through a 300-move forced mate in chess or some bizarre sudoku before dying of old age.

Yeah in theory a human can brute force or guess like a computer, but that's obviously not the point of a meaningful game or problem to solve because it's mindless.

[chongli]

Nothing about the guess and check strategy implies that you have zero prior information and must guess blindly in an attempt to win the lottery for picking the correct move. Typically, people using guess and check have other principles, rules, or heuristics they use to narrow the search space down to a handful of options.

My original point still stands. A cultural bias against guess-and-check is just another way of saying that strategies which determine an exact sequence of moves using only strict deduction from known theory are the only “acceptable” way to play sudoku. That, to me, is highly limiting and absurd. It’s also inefficient because often you’re faced with a choice between two mutually exclusive options and it’s just plain faster and less error-prone to guess and check than it is to carry out all of the deduction in your head before making the correct move.

[Barrin92]

it's not an absurd limitation. You're not playing sudoku to beat an opponent (idk maybe there's competitive sudoku where people guess if it's most efficient), you're playing to get better at reasoning. Deduction literally is the game, not filling squares with numbers.

If you're doing programming exercises you can brute force or guess a solution but there's a cultural bias against doing that, because what you're trying to learn is how to be smart about the problem, otherwise the exercise is pointless.

Guessing never adds anything to the experience in a game that's deliberately set up to be a test of skill. It's like doing an actual puzzle. Yes you can trial and error the edges of the pieces randomly, maybe that's faster, but it defeats the purpose of puzzling. A puzzle that heavily benefits from guesswork is just a bad puzzle.

[chongli]

If you're doing programming exercises you can brute force or guess a solution but there's a cultural bias against doing that, because what you're trying to learn is how to be smart about the problem, otherwise the exercise is pointless.

What exactly counts as “being smart about the problem” is culturally determined. In my view, taking ten times as long to solve the problem using pure deduction (because you’re struggling to hold all of the possibilities in your head simultaneously) is being less smart about the problem than making an informed guess and then quickly and mechanically checking whether you were correct.

A puzzle that heavily benefits from guesswork is just a bad puzzle.

That puts an upper limit on the difficulty rating of puzzles which is in some sense limited by the imagination of solvers.

[olliej]

Unless the whole point of the puzzle is to determine the logic.

Bruteforcing (aside from taking longer is just not interesting. When people are setting puzzles a lot of time and effort is put into how the logic is expected to work on the path to solving. When people post puzzles for testing if people find a spot where bifurcation is necessary they’ll generally point it out and the setter will check to see if they made an error or whether the person testing has missed some of the logic.

[chongli]

Guess-and-check is not brute forcing. I addressed this in another part of this thread.

[olliej]

Ok, what do you mean by “guess and check”?

Because general rule for a sudoku to not be considered is that at no point should you be in a position where you are needing to simply try different solution paths to find one that works.

I’d recommend watch a video by cracking the cryptic on YouTube to see how the solve works at the higher levels, as it’s possible I’m misunderstanding what you’re meaning by guess and check, and you’re meaning similar logic to what is used. In that case the problem is calling it “guess and check” leading us sudoku folk to think you’re meaning bifurcation.

[lupire]

IOW: intelligence is data compression.

[shagie]

Intelligence is the ability to craft a more optimal solution than a brute force approach would take.

In the domain of data compression, Kolmogorov complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity is one of the approaches to try to measure that amount.

[chongli]

Guess-and-check is not the same as brute force (nor exhaustive search). No one is sitting there with an empty sudoku grid, filling the whole thing in with guessed numbers, checking to see if the solution is valid, then erasing everything and starting over. Literally no one does that, not even software sudoku solvers (it takes way too long).

Guess-and-check is literally just another name for backtracking algorithms. These do not work (for humans) without an adequate suite of rules that can be use to prune the search space.