Fighting the Su-do-ku Mafia

A group of my friends are good at Su-do-ku. I call them the Su-do-ku mafia. They solve the online su-do-ku at http://www.websudoku.com (category: hard) in under 4 minutes (the average time taken by users is under 5 minutes from the stats shown). The average time for me is around 20 minutes with a record of 13:54. So when I talk about my times with this mafia, I get a lot of faces that seem to say, “peasant!”. Well, all brains are not alike. And I am still trying to work on my times. Brain-training as per Nintendo DS is a long time-consuming process and takes time. Earlier on, when I started on sudoku, I used to have a heavily scratched sudoku sheet in the daily newspaper because one way or the other I used to skew up the grid by filling it up with completely wrong sequence of digits. I guess my logical brain is not as developed as Einstein’s but so long as I can add digits when I go to the supermarket, I’m fine with it. Speaking of which, I have noticed that I can add numbers faster in my head now than before. I surprised a grocer by adding more than 10 lines from item price-list (which included weird change amounts) in head faster than his calculator. Nice. Perhaps, Sudoku has helped in other ways. Hope I get to improve my times and surprise my friends too.

And its not over yet. After that, its the Rubik’s cube for me. And there’s a story behind why it will be Rubik’s cube next. I was once waiting for a flight in the airport when I saw this kid around 10-12 years old who was tossing around the Rubik’s cube as if it was some sort of a toy he had become long tired of. His Dad who was sitting beside me took the cube mixed it up for almost a minute and handed it back to the kid. The little whizkid took a look at it and solved the cube in 3 minutes flat! Cool! It should not be that difficult if a kid can solve it. I will too. Someday. But first let me beat the su-do-ku mafia.