Now, solving sudoku just got easier !!!
For those who struggle to solve a
sudoku puzzle, scientists have come to your rescue!
Researchers at University
of Notre Dame have developed a mathematical algorithm that solves sudoku
puzzles very quickly, without any guessing or backtracking. Researchers, Zoltan
Toroczkai and Maria Ercsey-Ravasz, however, cannot only explain why some sudoku
puzzles are harder than others.
Toroczkai and Ercsey-Ravasz from
Romanias Babes-Bolyai University, began studying sudoku as part of their
research into the theory of optimization and computational complexity.
They note that
most sudokua enthusiasts use what is known as a "brute force" system
to solve problems, combined with a good deal of guessing.
Brute force systems essentially
deploy all possible combinations of numbers in a sudoku puzzle until the
correct answer is found. While the method is successful, it is also time
consuming.
Instead, Toroczkai and Ercsey-Ravasz
have proposed a universal analog algorithm that is completely deterministic (no
guessing or exhaustive searching) and always arrives at the correct solution to
a problem, and does so much more quickly.
They discovered that the time it
took to solve a problem with their analog algorithm correlated with the
difficulty of the problem as rated by human solvers.
