Obi-Wan's Sudoku Solver

Several of my family members are really into these sudoku number puzzles. I'm pretty good with numbers, so they tried to get me hooked, too. I'm also a died in the wool computer programmer and problem solver, so when I saw my first sudoku puzzle, the first thing that popped into my head was a simple computer algorithm to solve the puzzle for me. After all, computers were created to do mundane, number crunching tasks really quickly so I wouldn't have to. Why should I sit there and waste time solving those puzzles by hand?

Anyway, in about 90 minutes (half of which was spent optimizing the code to make really large puzzles run faster), I hammered out a 200-line C program that would solve sudoku puzzles of arbitrary size, where "arbitrary" means any perfect square larger than 1. On a 1 GHz P3, it will solve a 144x144 puzzle in about half a second.

I created this web page as an interface to that program so you, my loyal subjects, can solve sudoku puzzles as fast as you can click your mouse. First, pre-fill any values you want in order to constrain the solution. Then tell my program to fill in all the missing values. Note that there may well be more than one correct solution to your puzzle; my program only finds one of them.

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originally created 30 Aug 2006. last updated 7 Mar 2008

Obi-Wan (obiwan@jedi.com)

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