More on Array Logic

Now, I could keep going step by step with my wingdings, and in fact I did over here in the googledoc of my rough draft.  But assuming that anyone reading this blog already does a lot of sudokus, I've already pointed out most of what I wanted to.

Here's what the puzzle looked like after I'd gone through it once.

M	7	k	f	T	O	8	3	J
s	s	s	x	s	s	s	s	s
	M		7 8	f	T		O	J
T J	7	T	8			f	O	M
f	JJ		O		7	T		M
M	f	7		3	k	J	8	T
M 8		8	T	k	O	J	f
J	k		f	7	8	3	M	T
7 /k	O	J	7 /M	T	f	M 8	3	8 3
7 /k	8	M	3 /J	O	3 /J		T	f
3	T	f	k	8	7 /M	M O	J	O

The X over the anchors is just an indicator that that array is entirely solved.

Yellow spaces are Antis, blue are knowns, light green are blockades, orange are Antis after placing the red smiley in ML and pink the Anti's after placing the blue smiley in TL.





















If we keep going, we'll get to a place where the Top zone looks something like this:

8	M		7 8	f	T		O	J
T 8	7	T	8			f	O	M
f	J		O		7	T		M

Do you how the parallel pairs of computer mice in TLl and TCl will give us a pair of mice in TRb(c/r)?  And of course, looking at the whole puzzle, we see another mouse in MRtc, which means that the mouse in TR has to fall into TRbr.

8	M		7 8	f	T		O	J
T 8	7	T	8			f	O	M
f	J		O		7	T	8	M 8

That's our X-wing, Parallel Pair, whatever you may call it, in action.  And while we might have figured out the same thing by looking at row Tb and seeing that the mouse couldn't go in each of the other spaces because of information in the zones below, marking the pairs in the squares made the deduction more noticeable.