Brainless Sudoku

[prog]

Puzzle people:

Is this for real? Can all Sudoku be solved - and solved relatively quickly - by this brute force method?

If so, I think that's pretty funny.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Essentially, yes.

If you've ever taken intro logic, you may remember a method of determining the truth of a proposition is to search for contradictions by building an inference tree. By showing there are no contradictions you accept the proposition as true. This is a process that can be mechanized by theorem-provers, and what he is doing with sudoku looks conceptually similar: by eliminating every number that cannot be the correct answer for a given square, you are eventually left with the one that is the answer. This is a process that must yeild the correct answer eventually so long as the puzzle is consistent.

Variants of the puzzle may make this kind of dull mechanical process even more dull and mechanical, but no puzzle of this form requires any insight to solve, ever, although insight might help you solve it faster.

Personally, I've invented a new kind of puzzle called sudon'tku, which is seeded with inconsistent values, making it impossible to solve at all...

[prog.livejournal.com]

My favorite variant is lunchboy's Snakes on a Sudoku, though it's not like I've ever tried to solve that either.