Dancing Sudoku

Introduction

Dancing Sudoku is a tool that can solve or generate Sudoku puzzles. You might wonder why there is another of those tools needed since there are already many of them available. The project was started as a kind of academic exercise. On a forum I found the remark that Donald Knuth's algorithmus for solving the Exact Cover Problem can be applied to the Sudoku problem. Donald Knuth calls his algorithmus 'Dancing Links', and thats where the name 'Dancing Sudoku' comes from. By transforming the Sudoku problem into an Exact Coverage problem, Sudoku puzzles can be solved in a very fast and efficient way. There is also no distinction anymore between easy and hard to solve puzzles. The algorithmus treats every puzzle as a recursive search tree.

Installation

For running the application you need a Java Runtime Environment installed on your computer. If you don't have it allready you can get it here. Now, follow the next steps:

  1. Download DancingSudoku.zip from here
  2. Extract the content to your local filesystem
  3. Go to the ..\DancingSudoku\bin folder
  4. Doubleclick on the DancingSudoku.jar file - That's it

If you have any questions or remarks, just contact me


Screen Shots

16 x 16 Sudoku 9 x 9 Sudoku 4 x 4 Sudoku

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