But there are puzzles that cannot be solved using these rules alone. In essence, they describe the most basic rules of the game. These rules will make a lot of sense to anyone who has ever tried his or her hand at a Sudoku puzzle.
To learn more about my progress on the “Medium” Sudoku puzzle, read the full post of Sudoku Episode 2 here and keep your eyes peeled for part 3 of our series.Peter Norvig’s excellent essay Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle is a fascinating read, and I would highly recommend you read it (or at least scan it briefly) before you read the rest of this post. While it was not hard for me to solve it by hand, I struggled to understand why the engine had not been able to progress further. I then grabbed a pencil and solved it without too much difficulty, circling the right candidate in each unsolved cell. I stared at the half-solved puzzle for a long time. The picture below shows how far my initial implementation could go:įigure 1 Half-solved Medium Sudoku Puzzle Gould six years to develop his program to generate unique puzzles, I should probably get back to work if I intend to solve these puzzles any time soon.Īt the end of the previous episode, my attempt to solve a Medium-difficulty puzzle failed. In the first blog of this series, I set myself the challenge of using the optimized inference engine, along with a few other advanced features of FICO® Blaze Advisor®, to solve Sudoku puzzles.
Just to clear my mind from worldly things to do.
I put the tv off and disconnect the phone Sometimes late at night when I’m on my own And in 2006, a tribute song to Sudoku was nominated by the Japanese Embassy for an award. Gould six years to develop the program, but Sudoku’s rise in popularity was meteoric: by the summer of 2005, there was already a celebrity-studded TV show called “Sudoku Live” on British TV. Thankfully, it was later abbreviated to Sudoku.Ĭuriously, the game only really took off outside of Japan after Wayne Gould, a Hong Kong judge, developed a computer program to generate unique puzzles, which he then submitted to British and American newspapers in 2004. The name comes from Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru, which roughly translates to “the digits must be single”.
Although similar “Number Place” puzzles can be found in 19 th century French newspapers, it turns out Sudoku, as we all know and love, is actually a millennial. Sudoku, I assumed, must have been the Japanese equivalent, with some hidden moral about the perfect balance of all things in life. In one of the famous chess origin legends, a mathematician in India is credited for inventing the game and teaching the king a valuable moral lesson about the value of small things. I assumed it was an ancient Japanese tradition, probably created by a famous court mathematician in the middle ages to entertain a bored emperor. For those of you already caught up, keep reading for more…īefore developing my Sudoku addiction, I knew very little about the origins of Sudoku. In case you missed it, click here to catch up on part 1. This blog is the second post in our Sudoku Series.