It’s been more than a week since my last post, so I decided to finally post again. This time I actually have a somewhat good reason for not posting. I have been developing a Sudoku solving program. I thought that it would be an interesting challenge to do a Sudoku solving program that relies only on logical deductions and never on brute force trial and error. Right now, it solves all of the easy and medium Sudokus, but it can’t solve most of the hard ones. After taking a look at this site though, I’m not sure if I’ll continue developing it. It turned out to be a far more complicated task than I imagined, and if I want to continue its development I have decided that it would be best to restructure the whole program, so that’s why I’m still not sure what to do. On one hand it seems like a fun challenge to program each one of the solving algorithms, but on the other hand there are just too many of them. I’ve also been reading some stuff about Sudoku solving programs and apparently there are some Sudokus that so far can only be solved by trial and error programs. As things stand now, I do plan to at least restructure the program and add a couple of the simple solving algorithms, but I have yet to start doing it. The funny thing about all this is that I usually don’t like sudokus.

Aside from programming, I’ve been watching some more anime. This time it was Elfen Lied. You can read my thoughts on it here. I also lost numerous hours of my time to Motherload and Super Serif Brothers. Motherload was very fun at first, but once you go deeper it just gets frustrating, I lost to a lava pit because I didn’t know what it was and thought I was digging up a ruby. Then I played again following the advice I found on digg’s comments and was killed by a gas pocket completely unaware of its existence. As for Super Serif Bros, it was great. For some reason I didn’t expect a text based game to be so hard, but I am still surprised at how much I like it.

I also wanted to post about this house. I’m not convinced that it’s a very good idea, but it certainly is interesting. A couple of pictures and a diagram of the house are available here. Also, this house reminds me of this other house, which I also wanted to post about. Source: digg.com

On a blog related note, I received my first comment spam today. Apparently while I was away from the blogsphere comment spam evolved. The comment read “Love the blog -I always look forward to the posts here !!”, so at first sight, one would think that it’s not really spam, but when you look at the url of the poster it becomes clear that it is. Just in case I’m wrong, and Lisa is indeed a loyal reader of my blog like she claims (and she is without a doubt reading this), then I apologize. Next time please use a less suspicious URL that does not advertise stretch mark removal creams.

I first heard about Elfen Lied on the IGN Boards, where some people said it was great, others said that it was “too disturbing” for their tastes, and everyone only seemed to agree that the opening music was great. Then I read its page on the Wikipedia which basically starts off with: “The story contains graphic nudity and a great deal of blood and gore, as well as psychological violence and extreme graphic violence.” By now I was already expecting it too be the goriest most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen. But it wasn’t. It certainly does have “nudity”, “a great deal of blood and gore”, “psychological violence” and “extreme graphic violence”, but none of it is there just for the sake of it. There is a reason why each one of those “disturbing” aspects is there. From what I had read, I actually thought it was going to be bloodier, sometimes people get cut up in half and there’s not that much blood coming out of them. Even Kill Bill is bloodier.

If you continue reading the Wikipedia article in search for what Elfen Lied is about you’ll reach a link to a Wikipedia entry titled “Elfen Lied body count” and then a description of how the show starts, which basically says that there is a naked girl killing everyone she finds. And its not wrong, but that’s not at all what Elfen Lied is about, at least not in my opinion. Basically, what I’m saying is just a remix of the good old “don’t judge a book by its cover”.

Elfen Lied is great in many aspects. The animation is good, and the backgrounds are simply beautiful; the music (especially the opening song) is great; the story keeps you interested throughout the series; most of the characters are very deep; and even though I don’t understand an ounce of Japanese, I thought the voice acting was good. However the depth of the characters is what surprised me the most. Each character has his or her own story and their actions reflect their background. In particular Nyü/Lacy’s character is simply amazing. In theory you should hate the character but in practice you end up liking her. Somehow although she is the one doing the most brutal killings, the others turn out to be the bad guys. Actually this is my favorite thing about Elfen Lied, it’s often hard to tell who’s right and who’s wrong. Most of the characters seem to either be doing the wrong things for the right reasons, or the wrong things because they were pushed into that position, and only a few characters seem to be doing the right things.

I won’t say anything else about Elfen Lied because I don’t want too spoil too much about it. But if you have a chance you should consider watching it, I highly recommend it.