Somewhat in the spirit of Stiv's This new puzzle type needs a name, can you solve this odd looking Sudoku and give it a name?
1 Answer
Here is my attempt at solving this:
I'm presuming that the numbers appearing at the side of the red square signify a Japanese Sum puzzle. A Japanese Sum puzzle is like a nonogram, with clues being equivalent to sums of consecutive digits appearing in a row separated by spaces. Digits in the same row cannot be repeated. Since this is a Sudoku puzzle as well, the digits must go from 1 - 9.
For the (20, 1) in row 4, at least 3 digits must be needed for the 20, so the 1 must appear in either column 5 or 6. If the 1 was in column 5, then there would be a space in row 4, column 4. This will leave only 2 spaces for the 20 in (2, 20) in column 4, which is impossible. So, we get the following
Row 3 (2, 9, 3) only has one solution, so we can fill that in as seen in the image below. This helps us solve some digits in the other squares.
The 27 in row 5 must be at least 4 digits long, so 13 in column 3 cannot be (9, 4). Instead, it must be (9, 3, 1). This leaves a 17 for the 20 in (20 1) in row 4, so there must also be an 8 and a 9 in row 4. Since row 5 and column 1 already has a 9 and this is a Sudoku puzzle, then there is only one solution. The rest of the digits can also be uncovered.
Once we have done that, then it is just a matter of solving the Sudoku by removing the blank spaces. Several of the digits can be trivially uncovered as shown below.
I got stuck here, so I filled the Sudoku with the available possible values.
At this point, I noticed that in the 2nd Sudoku square of the bottom row, only the middle column has 6s in it. Therefore, there couldn't be a 6 in row 4, column 5 of the sudoku and the 6 had to be in row 4 column 1. This had a domino effect that allowed me to solve the rest of the Sudoku. The solved Sudoku looks like
Since this included both Japanese Sums and Sudoku, we could call a puzzle like this "Sumdoku".
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$\begingroup$ Excellent solution, with a great presentation! Great solve! $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 4, 2020 at 16:02
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$\begingroup$ Nicely done! Would you like to include a name for the puzzle-type? :) $\endgroup$– JensCommented Oct 4, 2020 at 19:06
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1$\begingroup$ I think you had a typo in the sudoku candidates at R7C4 (should be 16 instead of 17, then the 6 could be eliminated by naked pair on R7). Lucky that the typo didn't screw up the solution :) $\endgroup$– BubblerCommented Oct 5, 2020 at 2:41
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$\begingroup$ @Bubbler Oh yes, you are right! I was actually supposed to remove the 7 and immediately put 1 in that cell. Thanks! $\endgroup$– AlaikoCommented Oct 5, 2020 at 2:45