I was surprised to hear a good friend was recently bitten by the Sudoku bug and was battling against a tough puzzle. I have never caught the Sudoku bug. In order to satisfy my curiosity and help my friend, I did some research and looking around. I hope the following results can help.
*** Sudoku Bug First Aid Kit ***
Solver
After a few Goolge searches and testes/confirmations, I found an online 9×9 Sudoku Solver that seems to work very well and it comes with some helpful functions like hint, show candidates, and solve! The Solver can certainly be used to help train the mind to recognize patterns and thinking more logically when looking at a puzzle. Also check out the nice Sudoku background/Solving techniques.
Math Logic
Not satisfied by finding a solver, I discovered the wonderful 2010 preliminary paper “The Mathematics of Sudoku” by Tom Davis via the geometer.org site. A must read for lover of Sudoku Puzzles.
Puzzle Generator
And as the icing on the cake, I found an interesting 2008 Harvard math students’ paper “hsolve: A Difficulty Metric and Puzzle Generator for Sudoku” A good read if you are interested in the challenges in measuring the “difficulty level” of a puzzle and how to generate a new random puzzle.
Concluding thoughts
Hopefully, the above three tools can help “Sudoku-bitten-victims” enjoy the puzzles more.
Additional readings:
* Wikipedia Mathematics_of_Sudoku
* The Math behind Sudoku (from Cornell University) In particular, the bit about Sudoku being a NP-Complete problem.
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