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I've just acquired sgt-puzzles and solo. It's ok but I think it could go further. I have a better interactive program on my mobile phone. It could eg put the pencil marks in the right place in the cell. What I did was write a program to generate pencil marks and print out the 9x9 grid with all the pencil marks (up to a max of 5 so that it will fit on an A4 page). Then it is possible to look for patterns such as pairs, triples, etc. I then took it a step further and argued that a lot of operations are almost mindless and could be done automatically without taking away the real skill. So the program then looks for cells that have only one mark marks that occur only once in a row, column or square and repeats these steps, recalculating the marks each time, until you have a grid in which every cell has at least two marks and you can stop looking for the obvious and concentrate on the more advanced patterns. It's quite interesting to see how this program deals with sudoku puzzles printed in the press. Sometimes it will get the solution and leave you nothing to do, meaning that the puzzle was totally mindless and you are well out of it. Sometimes it does a step or two and leaves you with a hard puzzle with lots of marks. You can then start looking for X-wings, hidden pairs and stuff so you can delete marks. Anyone thinking of enhancing the solo program in this sort of direction? Tony Sumner -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html