I've really gotten into sudoku recently. I'm not sure what prompted this, but I've been playing through the New York Times' puzzles, which offer an easy, medium, and hard variation daily. My favorite feature of sudoku is that you don't have to guess randomly to make progress. As a logic puzzle, all of the information you need to solve it is there on the board in front of you. This makes parsing through that logic a fun challenge.

With practice, I've improved my chances of solving these puzzles. I can now solve both the easy and medium puzzles without any assistance or hints. The hard puzzles, however, have been a higher hurdle to clear. I get stuck on the hard puzzles pretty often, getting to a point where I run out of strategies to employ.

While reading up on various advanced strategies, I happened upon the Sudoku Solver by Andrew Stuart. This web application allows you to set up the game board, along with what you know so far, and then allow it to walk through the solution step by step. It's this latter feature that is so amazing to me. You can watch, step by step, which strategies get employed to break through whatever wall you're currently facing. I've used it a few times now to help me learn new strategies (naked pairs and hidden pairs being the newest ones I've learned). I'm still no expert, but this helpful little tool is helping me learn the ins and outs of how these games are typically solved.