The Godfather of Sudoku 47
circletimessquare writes "The New York Times profiles 55 year old Maki Kaji who runs Nikoli, in its article Inside Japan's Puzzle Palace. Nikoli is a puzzle publisher that prides itself on 'a kind of democratization of puzzle invention. The company itself does not actually create many new puzzles — an American invented an earlier version of sudoku, for example. Instead, Nikoli provides a forum for testing and perfecting them.' Also notable is how Mr. Kaji describes how he did not get the trademark for Sudoku in the United States before it was too late. But reminiscent of a theme many Slashdotters will find familiar about intellectual property: 'In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversight was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudoku's intellectual property rights let the game's popularity grow unfettered, Mr. Kaji says.' Will Nikoli be the source of the next big puzzle fad after Sudoku?"
Re:Sudoku Solvers (Score:4, Informative)
It might not work, as some sudokus are extremely devilish. Instead of trying to solve it in one batch, try breaking it down into steps (e.g. have the script partly solve the system rather than having the server time the script out.)
An example is the implementation at http://www.scanraid.com/sudoku.htm [scanraid.com] - although this is slower since it takes step-by-step very literally.
Difficulty Rating (Score:2, Informative)
That makes sense, as ratings are based on difficulty for a human to solve.
A difficult Sudoku might involve identifing a complex relationship in order to solve it logically, without guessing. Where as a simple Sudoku might involve only identifing simple logical relationships, but may have numerous possibilities that would increase the time of a brute force technique.
Re:Binary Sudoku (Score:1, Informative)