Nick Johnson
Aug 25, 2017 · 1 min read

Thanks!

No, I thought of that possibility at first, but I decided to see if it was possible to solve it without any random guessing and/or backtracking first. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do it by hand first, because I could tell for sure if I could solve it without guessing that way. I think it would probably be possible to solve it in a way that involves guessing too, but I think that it would be more efficient not to guess (and less annoying probably too (at least by hand) haha).

I’m pretty sure any set of clues should be able to be solved without guessing, but I know it works for sure at least on the test cases given on Codewars (there are 20 in total, but I think it might just be a variation of 4 or 5 clues, just rotated). If you find or come up with a set of clues one that can’t be solved without guessing, I would definitely like to see them, to see if my theory really works for any situation.

I haven’t actually tried Sudoku before, except for a couple of Codewars kata, but I would definitely be interested in trying a similar approach. The ones I did on Codewars were just solution validity checkers, not solvers, so I haven’t had a chance to really try any yet.

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    Nick Johnson

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