Sudoku

Bell Green · Post by **Bell Green** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 6:32 am

Trains, planes, tubes, buses and even on park benches they are all at it. I thought it was all a bit nerdy, till I tried it. Got the day off and I could be writing a song, but no, downloaded "Sudoku Susser" for osx and that's my day gone. Infuriating yet addictive. Bugger.

HeuristicsInc · Post by **HeuristicsInc** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 11:26 am

after googling, i have discovered that in fact i already enjoy these quite a bit but had no idea what they're called

-bill

j$ · Post by j$ » Fri Aug 26, 2005 4:26 pm

Nerds.

GlennCase · Post by **GlennCase** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 6:55 pm

I now know what I will be doing on the Greyhound from Spokane to Seattle tomorrow.

I printed off a few from http://play.websudoku.com/

ROCK!

Glenn (DR FUNK)

Adam! · Post by **Adam!** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 2:25 am

After a quick google to find out what this was, my programming fingers are itching. It couldn't be too hard to whip up an AI to solve these. Maybe an A-star search, using some kind of constraint to speed things up. I wonder what would make a good admissible heuristic... hmm...

j$ wrote:Nerds.

Some of us more so than others.

bz£ · Post by **bz£** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 5:08 am

Puce wrote:After a quick google to find out what this was, my programming fingers are itching...
Some of us more so than others.

To me, the more interesting job would be writing a program to generate these-- guaranteeing that there is exactly one solution might be fun. Actually tried to do this once with the related "cross-sums" style of puzzle because I was annoyed that typical puzzle mags never had more than two or four of them. Never finished it because I found another program that did the same thing.

On topic, I'd try transforming a puzzle into a series of logic clauses; it's a mess but there is probably a way to arrange things so that you can resolve in linear time. Lunch interval is ending at Trent Bridge, so I'll think no more about this!

Niveous · Post by **Niveous** » Wed Sep 14, 2005 8:00 am

I just found out about these on Friday and now I'm absolutely addicted.

NeilThrun · Post by **NeilThrun** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 7:00 pm

If you play these on paper heres a little hint to help you keep organized and neat.

Annotate boxes like this

___________
|* * *|
| |
|* * *|
| |
|* * *|
|_________|

The idea is if you know 3 cant be in the box put a dot in the apropriate position of the box to indicate it can't be a 3. Generally you go left to right, top to bottom. The top left being 1 and the middle right being 6, and so on.

EDIT: Wow, that box did not work. But you get the idea i think.