[Haskell-cafe] Code Review: Sudoku solver

[Jared Updike]

Chris wrote:
> You need more than 5 examples.  The truly evil puzzles are rarer than that.  Go
> get the set of minimal puzzles and see how far your logic takes you.

Chris elucidated some of my questions before I finished writing my email...

Claus wrote:
> (*) actually, that was a bit disappointing!-(

How much harder is the problem of generating (hard/medium/easy)
(solvable) Sudoku puzzles? Are all puzzles solvable (that don't break
the rules at any point)? I imagine a simple way is to start with a
correctly saturated grid of numbers and then start randomly shooting
holes in it and testing if it is still solvable (either unambiguously
or ambiguously) with your Sudoku solver? A rough mesaure of the
difficulty of the unsolved puzzle could be how long the solver took to
solve it (number of steps) (and the number of possible solutions)? Are
puzzles with multiple solutions usually considered harder or easier?
Are these considered proper puzzles?

Is this a more interesting problem to try to solve (generating) rather
than solving puzzles? I haven't investigated it much but I thought
about it when I was writing YASS (Yet Another Sudoku Solver) of my
own. What makes a Sudoku puzzle fiendish? Just the amount of missing
information, the amount of lookahed required?

  Jared.

P.S. Another interesting problem could be trying other number
arrangements besides 9x9, e.g. hexadecimal puzzles... I wrote my
solver to handle these but I never saw other than 9x9 puzzles to try
it on (hence the idea of generating puzzles)... Is that because most
people want puzzles to solve by hand instead of computer?

--
http://www.updike.org/~jared/
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