Solving Kakuro with arithmetics
Sort of puzzled — I haven’t seen anywhere mentioning that some kakuro puzzles can be solved with the help of simple arithmetics (yet). Indeed I don’t mean the whole puzzle can be solved merely with addition and subtraction; nor do I mean every puzzle can be worked on this way. Arithmetics usually only works at the beginning, and only works with some kind of puzzles. Here is a simple example. Consider the following fragment:
It’s solvable without any arithmetics; but hey, I’m just illustrating how to do it in other way, and (arguably) easier way. Look at the diagram below:
Look at the 2 rows marked with green arrow, and 2 columns marked with cyan arrow. One get A + B = 22 + 8 - 11 - 7 = 12. Still, some more hints are needed. Now look at the column with sum = 35. Since 35 has only one combination (5, 6, 7, 8, 9), in order to pick 2 numbers out of these 5 and satisfying A + B = 12, viola, we have A=7 and B=5. Not hard, isn’t it?
2008-02-29: Next post on solving kakuro with arithmetics here.
2 Incoming Links
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[...] discussed in previous post , kakuro can be tackled using simple addition and subtraction during initial stage, particularly if [...]
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[...] time I have had discussed about using arithmetics to solve kakuro (part 1, part 2); most of the methods are trivial for everybody except the last case which is not apparent. [...]