Go Solve Some Puzzles …

It seems that every second research paper I review these days applies machine learning to some cybersecurity problem, and it feels like sometimes that we are losing our ability to solve problems with a solid mathematical base, and to use a formal proof that our answer is right or not. Our brain needs exercise, and to throw some data at a machine, and get it to make sense of it, is only exercising your fingers. We need to make sure our brain builds new connections, and find new routes, and we need to solve things.

A bit of Sudoku

I recently was on a flight, and the person sitting next had a Sudoku puzzle book. And so I pull up my Z3 Python script, and ran a few tests, and my little puzzle solver seemed to work okay. “Can I give it a try?”, I said. “Yes, of course”. The person then nodded off, and I set out to test out a few of the puzzles. With Python, it was so easy, and it was a matter of carefully typing in the values, and then running the script. In an instance the solution was there. And so for those puzzle, we get the answer of [here]:

When the person woke up, they picked up their puzzle book, and I could see they looked puzzle in having a full page of solutions…