2010

September 1

Sudoku Solver

Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, wrote an excellent essay explicating and showing an algorithm and its implementation in Python for solving Sudoku puzzles. His reason:

… Sudoku is “a denial of service attack on human intellect”. My wife was infected by the virus, and I wanted to convince her that the problem had been solved and didn’t need any more of her time.

Particularly interesting is the simplicity of the type of his solution, a combination of constraint propagation and search; the same approach used in my code for playing the four digit number game. The thoroughness and clarity of his writing is exceptional, a pleasure to read.

posted @ 12:31 PM EDT