Sudooku

Solution

The puzzle requires first solving the provided 9×9 Sudoku:

8	6	7	5	3	1	2	4	9
4	1	9	2	6	7	8	5	3
5	2	3	9	8	4	1	7	6
9	7	1	3	2	5	4	6	8
6	4	2	8	1	9	5	3	7
3	8	5	4	7	6	9	1	2
7	5	6	1	9	2	3	8	4
1	9	8	6	4	3	7	2	5
2	3	4	7	5	8	6	9	1

The instructions “Up, Left, Up, Down, Right, Left, and Down” can be interpreted as button presses in Double-Oh (hinted by the doubled letter “o” in the title). This means that they don’t necessarily go in the indicated direction, but rather we need to figure out what movements they actually perform such that we land on the indicated digits within the solved Sudoku grid (“from 2, then 7 9, 5 3 1, 7 5”). The movements are:

• Up = Small Up — moves up one square within the current 3×3 block.
• Left = Big Left — moves left one whole 3×3 block.
• Down = Small Right — moves right one square within the current 3×3 block.
• Right = Big Down — moves down one whole 3×3 block.

This yields the following movements. For each cell we visit, we can extract the corresponding letter from the provided letter grid.

Instruction	Movement	Cell	Letter
(starting position)		R6C9 (digit 2)	W
Up	Small Up	R5C9 (digit 7)	H
Left	Big Left	R5C6 (digit 9)	A
Up	Small Up	R4C6 (digit 5)	T
Down	Small Right	R4C4 (digit 3)	E
Right	Big Down	R7C4 (digit 1)	V
Left	Big Left	R7C1 (digit 7)	E
Down	Small Right	R7C2 (digit 5)	R

WHATEVER