ANN: Sudoku Assistant

Dan Shafer revdan at danshafer.com
Sat Jul 30 15:08:24 EDT 2005


Oh, thanks a LOT, Alex! Now I'll waste the entire freaking weekend  
doing Sudoku. I am already hooked! I never saw this kind of puzzle  
before (and after reading the article in Wikipedia, I know why;  
they're pretty new in terms of wide popularity) but it so fits my  
obsession with numeric patterns that I'm afraid I may just have found  
the thing that will ultimately destroy all that remains of my  
productivity.

I noticed a couple of things as I began working with your program.

First, I noticed that when I choose one of the puzzles with some  
givens in it, those givens are not eliminated from the display list  
of possibilities for other squares in the region. As I understand the  
rules of Sudoku -- and my knowledge base is less than two hours old  
at this point -- that would be quite helpful and would be expected, no?

Second, when I loaded puzzle #1, at some point in solving it, the  
square I'll call square 7 (lower left) in the lower-right region  
suddenly became blank and responded to clicks only by highlighting.  
It was no longer possible to put a value into that cell. That cell  
was NOT a given when the puzzle started.

Third, when played in the IDE, your program brings up the message box  
all the time, which is just slightly annoying. I'm guessing that if I  
compile it into a standalone that problem would go away.

Fourth -- and perhaps related to my second point above -- the number  
of solution values in the right column dropped to 0 at some point and  
stayed there. I took that to mean I had an error somewhere in the  
partial solution but after careful inspection, it seemed OK. But my  
scan may have overlooked the problem cited as the second point above,  
so that may be moot and expected behavior.

It occurred to me it would be way cool if I could take a puzzle from  
a magazine, enter the givens in your assistant and save it. I know  
you have a mechanism for loading a text file with a known format that  
would also accomplish that but unless you have plans to implement  
that, I may take a crack at it.

Cool program. Now where did I put my No-Doz?

:-D

Dan

On Jul 29, 2005, at 5:20 PM, Alex Tweedly wrote:

>
> The other day I mentioned that I had done a simple "Sudoku  
> Assistant" - a simple stack which gives you some assistance in  
> solving Sudoku Puzzles. I had done it over the course of an evening  
> or two while on vacation, and had decided that I really didn't find  
> Sudoku puzzles all that fascinating, so it had been languishing  
> since then.
>
> But mentioning it here, and having a couple of people ask about it,  
> revived my interest, so I've spent 3 hours today tidying it up and  
> adding a couple of useful features (Undo/Redo/combination  
> counts/...). (I also spent 4 or 5 hours learning basics of RunRev  
> in some areas I hadn't used before - useful for me, but only  
> contributed about 10 minutes of useful work towards this stack :-)
>
> It's posted in RevOnline, under Games, or username alextweedly -  
> called SudokuAssistant
> Enjoy, and as always I'd welcome any comments, suggestions, even  
> requests ...
>
> -- 
> Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net
>
>
>
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