• NY Times Sudoku
• NY Times Letter Boxed

(4 minutes) I created a Snap! project that helps with playing the Sudoku and "Letter Boxed" NY Times puzzles. My 12yo daughter and I started playing NY Times Sudoku together (https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/sudoku/hard) -- neither of us had ever really played before, I missed the early wave when everyone was playing it all the time. As we were solving hard puzzle after puzzle (but sometimes getting stuck!), we settled upon 4-5 "features" we searched for. We then wanted to see if the puzzles were getting stuck on were possible to solve based on our features (and we just weren't seeing them) or whether there were other features we needed to be looking for that we didn't know about yet. So I coded all the features in Snap! to simulate a perfect human using our features. So far (after more than a month straight), our algorithm hasn't failed to solve any puzzle. Overall, I wanted three things from this project (and all three are available in that project):

(1) Prove to me that the current game can be solved. Using the URL block, it loads the current game from NY Times and then solves it interactively.

(2) Let me type in what we have NOW as a partially solved game, and just show me the next hint using our algorithm.

(3) What if the game were ONE slot harder -- what if we were to hide ONE of the numbers that are shown, is THAT solvable using our feature algorithm? (so far, it never has been)

(1 minute) Letter Boxed (https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/letter-boxed) is a fun word game but on the iphone it doesn't tell you the upper bound on the number of words you are allowed to complete the puzzle. So I wrote a quickie script to show you that can be run from the iphone. Also, we wanted to see the answer, so it shows that too.