ANN: Sudoku Assistant

[Jim Hurley]

>
>Message: 3
>Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 01:20:19 +0100
>From: Alex Tweedly <alex at tweedly.net>
>Subject: ANN: Sudoku Assistant
>To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
>Message-ID: <42EAC7C3.8010006 at tweedly.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>
>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


Alex,

Thanks for the puzzle. Lots of fun. Dell Crosswords has a full page 
of these every month, though none as tough a your last. They 
generally are deterministic all the way to the end. Your number four 
requires assuming a solution at one point near the end and 
discovering a contradiction if the guess was wrong--proof by 
contradiction. (I must confess that the labels make it more difficult 
for me--harder to see what is filled in and what isn't.)

I am interested in what algorithm is used under the "Auto" button.

If you also enjoy Cryptogram puzzles, I have one which retrieves 4 
quotes from the web every day and encodes them for your decoding 
pleasure. It is my daily diagnostic tool to reveal the onset of 
senility. You can take a look at:

      go stack url "http://home.infostations.net/jhurley/DailyCryptoquote.rev"

It's a 450k file. It contains a dictionary for a decoder utility.

Jim