(no subject)

[trinityvixen]

Not getting to watch House be cranky last night (F YOU, AMERICAN IDOL!) makes me cranky. So here are some quotes from the IMDB to make me (and, you, I suppose) happy.


Wilson: Beauty often seduces us on the road to truth.
House: And triteness kicks us in the nads.

Wilson: That smugness of yours really is an attractive quality.
House: Thank you. It was either that or get my hair highlighted. Smugness is easier to maintain

House: I suppose "minimally at best" is your stiff upper lip British way of saying "No chance in hell"?
Chase: Actually, I'm Australian.
House: You put the Queen on your money. You're British
(heeeee! It's funny because Hugh Laurie is British! Get it?)

House: How does someone just start drooling? Chase, were you wearing your short shorts?

Chase: You two are just too nasty to each other not to have been...nasty.
House: Hey, I can be a jerk to people I haven't slept with. I am that good.

House: Chase killed that woman, and now Foreman's in charge?
Cuddy: Yeah, we have a pecking order here; if Cameron kills somebody, Chase takes over. There's a flow chart in the lobby.

Chase: How'd you like it if I interfered in your personal life?
House: I'd hate it. That's why, cleverly, I have no personal life.

House: I take risks, sometimes patients die. But not taking risks causes more patients to die. So, I guess my biggest problem is I've been cursed with the ability to do the math.

House: Does your penis hurt?
Patient: What? No! Should it?
House: No, I thought I'd give you a really inappropriate question. Your lawyers will love it.

Wilson: You had the perfect person, and you blew it.
House: You saw the shoes!
Wilson: I'm not talking about her.
House: You're talking about Cameron.
Wilson: I'm talking about every woman you've ever given a damn about.
House: Cameron is so not perfect.
Wilson: Well, nobody's perfect.
House: Mother Theresa?
Wilson: Dead.
House: Angelina Jolie?
Wilson: No medical degree.
House: Oh, so now who's being picky?

House: What's with hiring a male secretary? J-Date not working out?

Foreman: You are aware of the Hippocratic oath, right?
House: The one that starts, "First, do no harm", then goes on to tell us: no abortions, no seductions, and definitely no cutting of those who labor beneath the stone? Yeah, took a read once. Wasn't impressed.

House: I teach you to lie, cheat, and steal, and as soon as my back's turned you wait in line?

Also, why is it that I can solve "Beware! Very Challenging!" Su Doku puzzles faster than the "Demanding" ones? I mean, the book gets steadily more difficult as you move to the back, and the BVCs are after the Ds...so why?

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

why is it that I can solve "Beware! Very Challenging!" Su Doku puzzles faster than the "Demanding" ones?

I don't know - you're some kind of reverse math genius? They are supposed to be harder. Peter has algorithms and everything.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Well, some of them are harder. I think I've erased and re-erased a few too many times on a couple of the really hard ones--I didn't finish one I worked on all night last night, for instance--but it seems like I did the same thing on the 'demanding' ones. Oh well, either way, I have the easy ones to look forward to when I finish.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

It may be that your method of approaching them is more effective on the "harder" ones. I have a couple of favored techniques for solving Sudoku puzzles, and some puzzles favor one or another.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

That's probably it, then. Stupid puzzles. I hate them. Except, of course, I am addicted to them.

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

What algorithms does he use?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Secret ones.

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

...just because I've had floating in my head for a little while an idea for a "message sending" algorithm to solve su doku, but I haven't been able to solidify it. It's strange and either close to the theoretical best performance solution or else equivalently as bad as the naive approach of trying out all possible combinations.

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

What's your su doku heuristic? Most likely when they're making the template patern for constructing puzzles they make assumptions on what's "harder" based on the heuristics they assume people use. You seem to recognize a pattern which the creators consider less obvious than whatever standard ones they've come up with.

Within a certain band of su doku puzzles the term "difficulty" is inherently fuzzy. Question, though: in general, is there supposed to be only one solution for each puzzle?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

There is always only one solution for the puzzle. They're fully constrained systems. This is actually why they appeal to me in the first place.

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

OK, so the designers specifically make the puzzles that way. That makes solving them much easier, but much less interesting.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Umm...if there wasn't only one solution, then it wouldn't be solvable. All published sudoku puzzles only have one solution.

Did you mean only one way of reaching that solution? Because that's a whole different thing.

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

If there were more than one soluion then they can certainly still be solved, it's just that a more generalized method would have to be applied. The only su doku puzzle which can't be "solved" in some way is the empty board.

It's the same way that a system of linear equations can be solved for a space of solutions if there isn't a singular solution. Since su doku has a finite set of values, the space for any solution is finite and so it's not so bad.

There are an infinite number of methods to solve any puzzle, but almost all of them are absurd.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, there are many ways to arrive at the same configuration of numbers, so you can give the puzzler different sets of numbers to achieve the same end result, and the difficulty will be different. In that sense, I suppose there is only one solution, ultimately, for a given number configuration. But I don't think you can use the same jumping off point to conclusively get two different configurations, no.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Huh?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Uh, what I meant was that there might be many possible ways to give clues to one final answer, but that it wasn't possible to get two correct final answers from one clue set. That make more sense?

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

The one solution part is very important b/c it now lets me present an interesting project to Jamie and Nunzio.

Essentially, since there's only one solution for each given puzzle, but there are clearly many ways of presenting that same puzzle based on "difficulty," it should be possible to determine what method the designers themselves use to solve the puzzles since we can determine what their metric is for measuring "closeness to a solution."