Provided by: sgt-puzzles_20230410.71cf891-2build2_amd64 bug

NAME

       sgt-solo - Number placement puzzle

SYNOPSIS

       sgt-solo  [--generate  n]  [--print  wxh [--with-solutions] [--scale n] [--colour]] [game-
       parameters|game-ID|random-seed]

       sgt-solo --version

DESCRIPTION

       You have a square grid, which is divided into as many equally sized sub-blocks as the grid
       has  rows.  Each  square must be filled in with a digit from 1 to the size of the grid, in
       such a way that

             every row contains only one occurrence of each digit

             every column contains only one occurrence of each digit

             every block contains only one occurrence of each digit.

             (optionally, by default off) each of the square's two main diagonals contains  only
              one occurrence of each digit.

       You  are  given some of the numbers as clues; your aim is to place the rest of the numbers
       correctly.

       Under the default settings, the sub-blocks are square or rectangular. The  default  puzzle
       size  is  3×3 (a 9×9 actual grid, divided into nine 3×3 blocks). You can also select sizes
       with rectangular blocks instead of square ones, such as 2×3 (a 6×6 grid divided  into  six
       3×2  blocks).  Alternatively,  you  can  select ‘jigsaw’ mode, in which the sub-blocks are
       arbitrary shapes which differ between individual puzzles.

       Another available mode is ‘killer’. In this mode, clues are  not  given  in  the  form  of
       filled-in  squares;  instead,  the grid is divided into ‘cages’ by coloured lines, and for
       each cage the game tells you what the sum of all the digits in that cage should be.  Also,
       no  digit may appear more than once within a cage, even if the cage crosses the boundaries
       of existing regions.

       If you select a puzzle size which requires more than 9 digits, the additional digits  will
       be  letters  of  the  alphabet. For example, if you select 3×4 then the digits which go in
       your grid will be 1 to 9, plus ‘a’, ‘b’ and  ‘c’.  This  cannot  be  selected  for  killer
       puzzles.

       I  first saw this puzzle in Nikoli (https://www.nikoli.co.jp/en/puzzles/sudoku/), although
       it's also been popularised by various newspapers under the name  ‘Sudoku’  or  ‘Su  Doku’.
       Howard Garns is considered the inventor of the modern form of the puzzle, and it was first
       published in Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games. A more elaborate treatment of the history
       of the puzzle can be found on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku).

Solo controls

       To  play  Solo, simply click the mouse in any empty square and then type a digit or letter
       on the keyboard to fill that square. If you  make  a  mistake,  click  the  mouse  in  the
       incorrect square and press Space to clear it again (or use the Undo feature).

       If  you right-click in a square and then type a number, that number will be entered in the
       square as a ‘pencil mark’. You can have pencil marks for  multiple  numbers  in  the  same
       square. Squares containing filled-in numbers cannot also contain pencil marks.

       The game pays no attention to pencil marks, so exactly what you use them for is up to you:
       you can use them as reminders that a particular square needs to be  re-examined  once  you
       know  more about a particular number, or you can use them as lists of the possible numbers
       in a given square, or anything else you feel like.

       To erase a single pencil mark, right-click in the square and type the same number again.

       All pencil marks in a square are erased when you left-click and type a number, or when you
       left-click  and  press  space.  Right-clicking  and  pressing space will also erase pencil
       marks.

       Alternatively, use the cursor keys to move the mark around the grid. Pressing  the  return
       key  toggles  the  mark  (from  a normal mark to a pencil mark), and typing a number in is
       entered in the square in the appropriate way; typing in a 0 or using the  space  bar  will
       clear a filled square.

       (All the actions described below are also available.)

Solo parameters

       Solo  allows  you  to  configure  two separate dimensions of the puzzle grid on the ‘Type’
       menu: the number of columns, and the number of rows, into which the main grid is  divided.
       (The  size  of  a block is the inverse of this: for example, if you select 2 columns and 3
       rows, each actual block will have 3 columns and 2 rows.)

       If you tick the ‘X’ checkbox, Solo will apply the optional extra constraint that  the  two
       main  diagonals  of  the grid also contain one of every digit. (This is sometimes known as
       ‘Sudoku-X’ in newspapers.) In this mode, the squares on the two  main  diagonals  will  be
       shaded slightly so that you know it's enabled.

       If  you tick the ‘Jigsaw’ checkbox, Solo will generate randomly shaped sub-blocks. In this
       mode, the actual grid size will be taken to be the product of the numbers entered  in  the
       ‘Columns’ and ‘Rows’ boxes. There is no reason why you have to enter a number greater than
       1 in both boxes; Jigsaw mode has no constraint on the grid size, and  it  can  even  be  a
       prime number if you feel like it.

       If  you  tick  the  ‘Killer’  checkbox,  Solo  will  generate a set of of cages, which are
       randomly shaped and drawn in an outline of a  different  colour.  Each  of  these  regions
       contains a smaller clue which shows the digit sum of all the squares in this region.

       You  can also configure the type of symmetry shown in the generated puzzles. More symmetry
       makes the puzzles look prettier  but  may  also  make  them  easier,  since  the  symmetry
       constraints  can  force  more  clues  than  necessary to be present. Completely asymmetric
       puzzles have the freedom to contain as few clues as possible.

       Finally, you can configure the difficulty of the generated puzzles. Difficulty levels  are
       judged by the complexity of the techniques of deduction required to solve the puzzle: each
       level requires a mode of reasoning which  was  not  necessary  in  the  previous  one.  In
       particular, on difficulty levels ‘Trivial’ and ‘Basic’ there will be a square you can fill
       in with a single number at all times, whereas at ‘Intermediate’ level and beyond you  will
       have  to make partial deductions about the set of squares a number could be in (or the set
       of numbers that could be in a square). At ‘Unreasonable’ level, even this is  not  enough,
       and  you  will  eventually  have to make a guess, and then backtrack if it turns out to be
       wrong.

       Generating difficult puzzles is  itself  difficult:  if  you  select  one  of  the  higher
       difficulty  levels,  Solo  may have to make many attempts at generating a puzzle before it
       finds one hard enough for you. Be prepared to wait, especially if you have also configured
       a large puzzle size.

Common actions

       These  actions  are  all  available  from  the  ‘Game’ menu and via keyboard shortcuts, in
       addition to any game-specific actions.

       (On Mac OS X, to conform with local user interface standards, these actions  are  situated
       on the ‘File’ and ‘Edit’ menus instead.)

       New game (‘N’, Ctrl+‘N’)
              Starts a new game, with a random initial state.

       Restart game
              Resets the current game to its initial state. (This can be undone.)

       Load   Loads a saved game from a file on disk.

       Save   Saves the current state of your game to a file on disk.

              The  Load  and  Save operations preserve your entire game history (so you can save,
              reload, and still Undo and Redo things you had done before saving).

       Print  Where supported (currently only on Windows), brings up a  dialog  allowing  you  to
              print   an  arbitrary  number  of  puzzles  randomly  generated  from  the  current
              parameters, optionally including the current puzzle. (Only for puzzles  which  make
              sense  to  print,  of  course  –  it's  hard  to  think  of  a  sensible  printable
              representation of Fifteen!)

       Undo (‘U’, Ctrl+‘Z’, Ctrl+‘_’, ‘*’)
              Undoes a single move. (You can undo moves back to the start of the session.)

       Redo (‘R’, Ctrl+‘R’, ‘#’)
              Redoes a previously undone move.

       Copy   Copies the current state of your game to the clipboard in text format, so that  you
              can  paste  it  into  (say)  an  e-mail  client  or  a  web message board if you're
              discussing the game with someone else. (Not all games support this feature.)

       Solve  Transforms the puzzle instantly into its solved state. For some games  (Cube)  this
              feature is not supported at all because it is of no particular use. For other games
              (such as Pattern), the solved state can be used to give  you  information,  if  you
              can't  see  how  a  solution  can exist at all or you want to know where you made a
              mistake. For still other games (such as  Sixteen),  automatic  solution  tells  you
              nothing  about  how to get to the solution, but it does provide a useful way to get
              there quickly so that you can experiment with set-piece moves and transformations.

              Some games (such as Solo) are capable of solving a game ID you have typed  in  from
              elsewhere.  Other  games  (such  as  Rectangles) cannot solve a game ID they didn't
              invent themself, but when they did invent the game ID they know what  the  solution
              is  already. Still other games (Pattern) can solve some external game IDs, but only
              if they aren't too difficult.

              The ‘Solve’ command adds the solved state to the end of  the  undo  chain  for  the
              puzzle.  In other words, if you want to go back to solving it yourself after seeing
              the answer, you can just press Undo.

       Quit (‘Q’, Ctrl+‘Q’)
              Closes the application entirely.

Specifying games with the game ID

       There are two ways to save a game specification out of a puzzle and recreate it later,  or
       recreate it in somebody else's copy of the same puzzle.

       The  ‘Specific’ and ‘Random Seed’ options from the ‘Game’ menu (or the ‘File’ menu, on Mac
       OS X) each show a piece of text (a ‘game ID’) which is sufficient to reconstruct precisely
       the same game at a later date.

       You  can  enter  either  of  these  pieces  of  text  back  into the program (via the same
       ‘Specific’ or ‘Random Seed’ menu options) at a later point, and it will recreate the  same
       game.  You  can  also  use either one as a command line argument (on Windows or Unix); see
       below for more detail.

       The difference between the  two  forms  is  that  a  descriptive  game  ID  is  a  literal
       description  of  the  initial  state of the game, whereas a random seed is just a piece of
       arbitrary text which was provided as input to the random number generator used  to  create
       the puzzle. This means that:

             Descriptive game IDs tend to be longer in many puzzles (although some, such as Cube
              (sgt-cube(6)), only need very short descriptions). So a  random  seed  is  often  a
              quicker  way  to  note  down  the puzzle you're currently playing, or to tell it to
              somebody else so they can play the same one as you.

             Any text at all is a valid  random  seed.  The  automatically  generated  ones  are
              fifteen-digit  numbers,  but anything will do; you can type in your full name, or a
              word you just made up, and a valid puzzle will be generated from it. This  provides
              a  way  for  two or more people to race to complete the same puzzle: you think of a
              random seed, then everybody types it in  at  the  same  time,  and  nobody  has  an
              advantage due to having seen the generated puzzle before anybody else.

             It  is often possible to convert puzzles from other sources (such as ‘nonograms’ or
              ‘sudoku’ from newspapers) into descriptive game IDs suitable  for  use  with  these
              programs.

             Random  seeds  are not guaranteed to produce the same result if you use them with a
              different version of the puzzle program. This is because the  generation  algorithm
              might  have  been  improved  or  modified  in  later versions of the code, and will
              therefore produce a different  result  when  given  the  same  sequence  of  random
              numbers.  Use  a descriptive game ID if you aren't sure that it will be used on the
              same version of the program as yours.

              (Use the ‘About’ menu option to  find  out  the  version  number  of  the  program.
              Programs  with  the same version number running on different platforms should still
              be random-seed compatible.)

       A descriptive game ID starts with a piece of text which  encodes  the  parameters  of  the
       current game (such as grid size). Then there is a colon, and after that is the description
       of the game's initial state. A random seed starts with a similar string of parameters, but
       then it contains a hash sign followed by arbitrary data.

       If  you  enter  a descriptive game ID, the program will not be able to show you the random
       seed which generated it, since it wasn't generated from a random  seed.  If  you  enter  a
       random seed, however, the program will be able to show you the descriptive game ID derived
       from that random seed.

       Note that the game parameter strings are not always identical between the two  forms.  For
       some  games,  there  will  be  parameter  data  provided with the random seed which is not
       included in the descriptive game ID. This is because that parameter  information  is  only
       relevant  when  generating puzzle grids, and is not important when playing them. Thus, for
       example, the difficulty level in Solo (above) is not mentioned in the descriptive game ID.

       These additional parameters are also not set permanently if you type in  a  game  ID.  For
       example, suppose you have Solo set to ‘Advanced’ difficulty level, and then a friend wants
       your help with a ‘Trivial’ puzzle; so the  friend  reads  out  a  random  seed  specifying
       ‘Trivial’ difficulty, and you type it in. The program will generate you the same ‘Trivial’
       grid which your friend was having trouble with, but once you  have  finished  playing  it,
       when  you  ask  for  a new game it will automatically go back to the ‘Advanced’ difficulty
       which it was previously set on.

The ‘Type’ menu

       The ‘Type’ menu, if present, may contain a list of preset game settings. Selecting one  of
       these will start a new random game with the parameters specified.

       The  ‘Type’  menu  may  also  contain a ‘Custom’ option which allows you to fine-tune game
       parameters. The parameters available are specific to each game and are  described  in  the
       following sections.

Specifying game parameters on the command line

       (This section does not apply to the Mac OS X version.)

       The  games in this collection deliberately do not ever save information on to the computer
       they run on: they have no high score tables and no saved preferences. (This is  because  I
       expect  at  least  some  people  to  play  them  at  work,  and those people will probably
       appreciate leaving as little evidence as possible!)

       However, if you do want to arrange for one of these games to default to a  particular  set
       of parameters, you can specify them on the command line.

       The easiest way to do this is to set up the parameters you want using the ‘Type’ menu (see
       above), and then to select ‘Random Seed’ from the ‘Game’ or ‘File’ menu (see  above).  The
       text in the ‘Game ID’ box will be composed of two parts, separated by a hash. The first of
       these parts represents the game parameters (the size of the playing area, for example, and
       anything else you set using the ‘Type’ menu).

       If  you  run  the game with just that parameter text on the command line, it will start up
       with the settings you specified.

       For example: if you run Cube (see sgt-cube(6)), select ‘Octahedron’ from the ‘Type’  menu,
       and   then   go   to   the  game  ID  selection,  you  will  see  a  string  of  the  form
       ‘o2x2#338686542711620’. Take only the part before the hash (‘o2x2’), and start  Cube  with
       that text on the command line: ‘sgt-cube o2x2’.

       If  you  copy  the  entire  game  ID on to the command line, the game will start up in the
       specific game that was described. This is occasionally a more convenient way  to  start  a
       particular game ID than by pasting it into the game ID selection box.

       (You  could  also  retrieve  the  encoded game parameters using the ‘Specific’ menu option
       instead of ‘Random Seed’, but if you do then some options, such as the difficulty level in
       Solo, will be missing. See above for more details on this.)

Unix command-line options

       (This section only applies to the Unix port.)

       In  addition  to  being  able  to specify game parameters on the command line (see above),
       there are various other options:

       --game

       --load These options respectively determine whether the command-line argument  is  treated
              as specifying game parameters or a save file to load. Only one should be specified.
              If neither of these options is specified, a guess is made based on  the  format  of
              the argument.

       --generate n
              If  this  option  is  specified,  instead  of a puzzle being displayed, a number of
              descriptive game IDs will be invented and  printed  on  standard  output.  This  is
              useful  for  gaining  access  to the game generation algorithms without necessarily
              using the frontend.

              If game parameters are specified on the command-line, they will be used to generate
              the game IDs; otherwise a default set of parameters will be used.

              The  most  common  use of this option is in conjunction with --print, in which case
              its behaviour is slightly different; see below.

       --print wxh
              If this option is specified,  instead  of  a  puzzle  being  displayed,  a  printed
              representation  of  one  or  more  unsolved  puzzles is sent to standard output, in
              PostScript format.

              On each page of puzzles, there will be w across and  h  down.  If  there  are  more
              puzzles than w×h, more than one page will be printed.

              If  --generate  has  also  been  specified,  the  invented game IDs will be used to
              generate the printed output. Otherwise, a list of game IDs is expected on  standard
              input  (which  can  be  descriptive or random seeds; see above), in the same format
              produced by --generate.

              For example:

              sgt-net --generate 12 --print 2x3 7x7w | lpr

              will generate two pages of printed Net puzzles (each  of  which  will  have  a  7×7
              wrapping  grid), and pipe the output to the lpr command, which on many systems will
              send them to an actual printer.

              There are various other options which affect printing; see below.

       --save file-prefix [ --save-suffix file-suffix ]
              If this option is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, saved-game  files
              for one or more unsolved puzzles are written to files constructed from the supplied
              prefix and/or suffix.

              If --generate has also been specified, the  invented  game  IDs  will  be  used  to
              generate  the printed output. Otherwise, a list of game IDs is expected on standard
              input (which can be descriptive or random seeds; see above),  in  the  same  format
              produced by --generate.

              For example:

              sgt-net --generate 12 --save game --save-suffix .sav

              will generate twelve Net saved-game files with the names game0.sav to game11.sav.

       --version
              Prints version information about the game, and then quits.

       The following options are only meaningful if --print is also specified:

       --with-solutions
              The  set of pages filled with unsolved puzzles will be followed by the solutions to
              those puzzles.

       --scale n
              Adjusts how big each puzzle is when printed. Larger numbers  make  puzzles  bigger;
              the default is 1.0.

       --colour
              Puzzles  will be printed in colour, rather than in black and white (if supported by
              the puzzle).

SEE ALSO

       Full documentation in /usr/share/doc/sgt-puzzles/puzzles.txt.gz.