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Strategies for Popular Number Puzzles
The Relative Incidence of Sudoku Strategies (old)
March 2012 data on 200,000 randomly produced puzzles.
| STRATEGY | Count | % |
| Human Strategy | 200000 | 100.0% |
| Naked Singles | 180387 | 90.2% |
| Hidden Singles | 99185 | 49.6% |
| Naked Pairs | 45175 | 22.6% |
| Naked Triples | 21359 | 10.7% |
| Hidden Pairs | 7942 | 4.0% |
| Hidden Triples | 1737 | 0.9% |
| Naked Quads | 249 | 0.1% |
| Hidden Quads | 0 | 0.0% |
| Tough Strategies | ||
| Intersection Removal | 34692 | 17.3% |
| X-Wing | 9576 | 4.8% |
| Simple Colouring | 20030 | 10.0% |
| Y-Wings | 16043 | 8.0% |
| Swordfish | 1313 | 0.7% |
| X-Cycles | 11050 | 5.5% |
| XY-Chain | 16724 | 8.4% |
| Diabolical Strategies | ||
| 3D Medusa | 5950 | 3.0% |
| Jellyfish | 24 | 0.0% |
| Avoidable Rectangle | 22 | 0.0% |
| Unique Rectangles | 1748 | 0.9% |
| Hidden Unique Rectangles | 4185 | 2.1% |
| XYZ Wing | 1539 | 0.8% |
| Aligned Pair Exclusion | 2313 | 1.2% |
| Extreme Strategies | ||
| Grouped X-Cycles | 1883 | 0.9% |
| Empty Rectangles | 144 | 0.1% |
| Finned X-Wing | 1150 | 0.6% |
| Finned Swordfish | 826 | 0.4% |
| Franken Swordfish | 6 | 0.0030% |
| Altern. Inference Chains | 6777 | 3.4% |
| Strong Links | 6301 | 3.2% |
| Weak Links | 14514 | 7.3% |
| Off-chain | 1951 | 1.0% |
| Digit Forcing Chains | 961 | 0.5% |
| Cell Forcing Chains | 912 | 0.5% |
| Unit Forcing Chains | 278 | 0.1390% |
| Sue-de-Coq | 0 | 0.0% |
| Almost Locked Sets | 12 | 0.0060% |
| Death Blossom | 4 | 0.0020% |
| Pattern Overlay Method | 28 | 0.0140% |
| Quad Forcing Chains | 52 | 0.0260% |
| Bowman Bingo | 49 | 0.0245% |
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