What is Skyscraper Sudoku?
There is a type of puzzle called a skyscraper, in which each row and column must contain numbers from 1 - n.
Outside the grid, a number is shown at the start/end of each row/column. This tells you how many buildings you can see from that viewpoint.
This uses the numerical value of the numbers in the cells, and you must imagine the numbers stand for the height of the buildings.
Thus if you have a '1' at the start of a region, then the first number in that region must be a 9, in a 9x9 puzzle, because if it were any other number you would see at least two buildings, e.g. 8,1,2,3,9: here you can see the tops of two buildings, 8 and 9 respectively.
Skyscraper sudoku uses the rules of the skyscraper puzzle and applies them to sudoku, in other words with the box regions in place, though of course any sudoku variant can be created with skyscraper regions added to it.
As you play this puzzle type you realise various nice pieces of logic that can be applied, which makes it quite an interesting variant of the puzzle to play. It's not seen that often in print, but fairly regularly appears on sudoku puzzling sites and so forth.
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