On 28/10/07 18:17, in article , "K"
wrote:



"Sacha" wrote
Ah - gifted teachers. I was lucky in that I had good English and French
teachers early on but absolutely terrible maths teachers. To this day I
can't do or understand Sudoku - it's another language to me and not one to
which I have the key. But because I had good *early* arithmetic teachers,
I
can add up at the speed of light!

Sudoku is a puzzle of logic. The symbols can be any 9 distinct symbols -
the fact they are numbers doesn't make the puzzle mathemetical any more
than one would regard it as verbal if it used the letters A-I instead.

Killer sudoku, otoh, does require a certain facility with arithmetic
(though not mathematics) alongside logic.


For me, Sudoku is a bit like the slide rule. I have lost count of the times
people have tried to explain both to me and given it up as hopeless. I will
freely admit that I have an instinctive brain rather more than a logical
one, so I suppose that doesn't help in the first place! OTOH, I often see
the solution to a practical problem involving the use of time and resources
three steps ahead of the rest of the family. But I think that's probably
training-by-motherhood!
I simply don't understand how you get 'into' the whole Sudoku grid, make it
work etc. in the first place. But with crosswords, I often get an
instinctive leap to the answer and have to work out why it's right
afterwards. How *that* happens, I have no way of explaining. You have a
scientific brain, I'd say, I certainly don't.
--
Sacha
http://www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove weeds from address)
'We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our
children.'