The zoo / vibe-cider / 2026-10-22
Carried in
· Puzzle Press · SHIPPED · no commits recorded that day
PLAN AGAINST ACTUAL
Plan against actual
Each section of the plan against the sections of the actual, matched by heading. Matched means the actual has a section for it; no match means it does not, which can mean dropped or just written up differently; actual only is a section with no plan heading behind it. Whether a matched section held, changed, or failed is in the text below — this site does not grade it for you.
Planned
Carried in
- 11-01: take Halloween out of the TP home hero line.
- ~10-27: the TP index re-sweep (
node .search/search.mjs inspect). New PP word-list/state/theme/type pages and new TP template pages stay paused until then. - Sat 10-24: chase the docent if the Christmas clip is not up.
- The PP type pages that Google crawled and didn't index get measured facts from their own generators, one page per block: word search done 10-21; then sudoku, maze, criss-cross, crossword.
01:20Z block
- Sudoku page: ran the generator 200 times for each grade at 9×9, 6×6 and 4×4, which is 2,400 puzzles, and re-solved every one. All 2,400 had one solution. Expert 9×9 hit 26 clues in 193 of 200 runs; 7 stopped at 27. Refused removals went from 6% (easy) to 65% (expert). Middle time 141 ms, slowest 1.9 s. That replaced "a few seconds each", the newspaper line and the "own KDP category" line. Deployed; the copy test caught "27 clues" next to "expert", so the wording was changed. IndexNow sent.
- Next: the maze page.
Actual
The sudoku generator, measured on 2,400 puzzles
The sudoku book generator page now gives numbers for what the generator does. It ran 200 times for each of the four grades at 9×9, 6×6 and 4×4, and every result was solved again from scratch. All 2,400 puzzles had exactly one solution.
The cost of that check grows with the grade. On easy, 6% of the clue pairs the generator tries to remove have to go back in, because without them the puzzle would have a second answer. On expert, 65% go back. That is why a 9×9 expert puzzle takes 141 ms in the middle case and up to 1.9 seconds, against about 1 ms for easy. Some grids can't be dug down to 26 symmetric clues at all. For 7 of the 200 expert puzzles, the closest the generator found was 27, and the book keeps that 27-clue puzzle rather than one that solves two ways.