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The other day we were at a restaurant and they gave my four year old a kids menu. One of the activities was a modified sudoku that went up to 6. My first thought was that I'd never realized you could do sudokus with other values of N.
But the really cool part was that once I taught her the rules (the constraints) she was actually able to figure it out without much help at all!
Turns out sudoku is a good way to teach kids logic, even at four years old.
> As computer security expert Ben Laurie has stated, Sudoku is "a denial of service attack on human intellect". Several people I know (including my wife) were infected by the virus, and I thought maybe this would demonstrate that they didn't need to spend any more time on Sudoku. That's hilarious! But what puzzles, or even activities wouldn't be classified by Ben as a DOS on humans?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While dancing links is cool, when benchmarking it turns out using bits to represent values, and just copying, ends up being faster. This is because on modern CPUs about the worst thing you can do is lots of pointer following.
I wrote a (straightforward) dancing links implementation that solves 17.000 puzzles/sec/core. It also validates uniqueness of the found solution. How much faster does it get? I'm genuinely curious
An oldie but a goodie. The other day we were at a restaurant and they gave my four year old a kids menu. One of the activities was a modified sudoku that went up to 6. My first thought was that I'd never realized you could do sudokus with other values of N. But the really cool part was that once I taught her the rules (the constraints) she was actually able to figure it out without much help at all! Turns out sudoku…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While dancing links is cool, when benchmarking it turns out using bits to represent values, and just copying, ends up being faster. This is because on modern CPUs about the worst thing you can do is lots of pointer following.
I wrote a (straightforward) dancing links implementation that solves 17.000 puzzles/sec/core. It also validates uniqueness of the found solution. How much faster does it get? I'm genuinely curious
How fast they are depends on the difficulty of the sudoku and on your machine, but it's typically a few thousand/s on the hardest known and several 100k/s to a million/s on very easy.
An oldie but a goodie. The other day we were at a restaurant and they gave my four year old a kids menu. One of the activities was a modified sudoku that went up to 6. My first thought was that I'd never realized you could do sudokus with other values of N. But the really cool part was that once I taught her the rules (the constraints) she was actually able to figure it out without much help at all! Turns out sudoku…
An oldie but a goodie. The other day we were at a restaurant and they gave my four year old a kids menu. One of the activities was a modified sudoku that went up to 6. My first thought was that I'd never realized you could do sudokus with other values of N. But the really cool part was that once I taught her the rules (the constraints) she was actually able to figure it out without much help at all! Turns out sudoku…
Sudoku solvers are near and dear to my heart. They’re my go to problem when learning a new programming language because they’re just complex enough to exercise a whole bunch of different language features. I built this when I wanted to learn Swift and dip my toe into machine learning: https://twitter.com/braddwyer/status/910030265006923776?s=21
I'm sure there are other, more efficient, ways to write sudoku solvers, but the simplicity and clarity the DFS solver offers is pretty cool IMO.