Cage Splitting

Strategies for Number Puzzles of all kinds

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Cage Splitting
With Innies and Outies, we were looking out for single cells poking into a block or protruding outwards. We said that a block can be any combination of adjacent units (as long as they don’t overlap, like a row and a column). Sometimes, there just won’t be a single cell in one cage.

In this example, which is the "Tough" example on the Killer Solver, we have two cage splitting examples. A side note: because the cage pattern is symmetrical you should be able to find and use this strategy twice. Not all Killer puzzles are symmetrical, however, but it is worth looking out for.

Lets look at the yellow block - a 2 column block. We can see the straight line dividing columns 7 and 8 and just one place where a cage pokes out. The sum of all the yellow cages - less the outie - is 75. So we now know that C8 and D8 must add up to 15 (90-75). This allows us to split the cage into two 2-cage cells, 15 and 21-15=6, the outie half. So 3,6,7,8 and 9 can be removed from C6 and C7 and 1,2,3,4 and 5 can be removed from C8 and D8.

Similarly, the 2-column blue block has a symmetrically placed outie 4-cage summing to 11. The split gives us 6 as the value of the innie (F2,G2) and 5 as the value of the outie (G3,G4).

Cage Splitting doesn’t often get us whole solutions, but together with combinations (our first strategy), it can dramatically reduce the possibilities in cells. Cage Splitting can leave behind an innie or an outie elsewhere in another direction, which is also useful.

Comments

Comments - Talk

Tuesday 9-Apr-2013

... by: PeteTy

the stratagety Bar to the left has no links to the killer strategies
only the killer solver can get here

conversely the killer strategies dont link to each other and must be accessed from the killer page

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Andrew's first site sudoku.org.uk has his old generators ALL the killers there are symmetrical ...

this site changed somewhere around mid 2012 the killers got more challenging and are seldom symmetrical

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cage splitting seems to work always

there are several sites that dont mention the killer convention (no repeated digits within a cage) and there are some sites and magazines that dont use it

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Kappa Puzzles
has several sudoku variants
one is sumoku which i jumped into with both feet to find out the answers werent coming out at all. turns out its not sudoku but killer roman squares of that 9x9 variety. and in a sudoku magazine.

Wednesday 3-Feb-2010

... by: steve voyce

didn't you mean c8 an d8 not b8 and c8. your highlight does not match your dotted lines. thanks steve ps i have enjoyed your sudoku solver for years. thanks.

Andrew Stuart writes:

Corrected, thx !