genina.com: Forum

My best time on easy is 1:50, and my best time on medium is 2:06. I suspect that my limitation is my fat fingers on the touchscreen. I would not be surprised if there were legitimate times for easy in the sub-1:00 space, but I doubt I'll ever be able to get there.

Ok folks. Is cheating possible? Yes! Of course it is! Sometimes the cheating is obvious -- anything less than 30 seconds seems to be impossible for a touchscreen device where a menu pops up for each cell. However, what some of you are saying is "obvious" cheating is often completely legitimate. Based on the times I have uploaded (where I know that I wasn't cheating), I find that my scores on easy and medium are consistently in the top 10%. I got there by playing thousands of games! There are some times that I know I could never beat, but they still fall under a statistically probably curve. Please don't label really good players as cheats: it stinks of sour grapes.

Can the cheating be stopped? A number of techniques could be employed to cut down on the cheating, for sure. I suspect that most of the things you could do would hurt legitimate players more than they would stop cheaters. I play sudoku on my phone. I also get phone calls on my phone. I get emails on my phone. I get text messages on my phone. All of these things, plus more, happen when I'm playing sudoku! Is it fair, during a competition, that my time should be ruined because my phone rang during the middle of a game? I assure you that I'm not working on the puzzle while I tell my mother how to fix her email. I can guarantee, as the owner of two Android devices, that simply removing the option to pause wouldn't keep me from cheating if I wanted to do so.

Cheaters will always find a way: if you worry yourself with finding a way to stop them, you will always be frustrated. Remember, SUDOKU IS A GAME. There's no cash being exchanged based on the results. Nobody is going to die if they don't get the best time. Nobody should be basing their self worth on the ranking they receive in competition. Just let it go! The system in place is fine! If they go screwing with it to stop cheaters, it will just run off legitimate players that want to enjoy themselves.